The Journal of ambulatory care management
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J Ambul Care Manage · Jul 2014
Secure e-mailing between physicians and patients: transformational change in ambulatory care.
Secure e-mailing between Kaiser Permanente physicians and patients is widespread; primary care providers receive an average of 5 e-mails from patients each workday. However, on average, secure e-mailing with patients has not substantially impacted primary care provider workloads. ⋯ Separate studies associated patient portal and secure e-mail use with both decreased and increased use of other health care services, such as office visits, telephone encounters, emergency department visits, and hospitalizations. Directions for future research include more granular analysis of associations between patient-physician secure e-mail and health care utilization.
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The electronic medical record has evolved from a digital representation of individual patient results and documents to information of large scale and complexity. Big Data refers to new technologies providing management and processing capabilities, targeting massive and disparate data sets. ⋯ For groups of patients, Big Data offers the promise of large-scale analysis of outcomes, patterns, temporal trends, and correlations. The evolution of Big Data analytics moves us from description and reporting to forecasting, predictive modeling, and decision optimization.
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J Ambul Care Manage · Jul 2014
Conceptual errors in the CMS refusal to make socioeconomic adjustments in readmission and other quality measures.
The Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services has made a policy decision that socioeconomic factors should not be adjusted for in its various quality measures and point both to arguments made by the National Quality Forum and to analysis of the distributions of quality results to support this view. We present counterarguments to this viewpoint and use the results reported by the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services to support its position to demonstrate that adjustments are necessary. We further argue that the incentives for providers to improve performance would not be weakened by including socioeconomic factor adjustments.