The growing sophistication of health information technology continues to dramatically impact all aspects of modern healthcare.

From boosting patient education to fostering colleboration among physicians and caretakers, the statistics are clear and compelling – health IT is changing healthcare for the better.

Fittingly, a new infographic from HealthIT.gov highlights how America’s healthcare providers are now using EHRs and Health IT to “achieve meaningful use and help to improve their patients’ care and health.”

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On Friday, Mayo Clinic and drchrono announced a joint agreement to provide patient-specific educational resources to physicians connected to the drchrono EHR platform.

drchrono, the first EHR to work with Mayo Clinic, said today that it has created a way to take the prominent clinic’s digitized patient education material and allow doctors to pass this along to patients “in an extremely efficient paperless way.”

As a result, doctors can now share educational material in a simple and digitally curated way with their patients.

“Sharing patient education material at a doctor’s office with paper is an archaic and inefficient practice,” asserts the EHR platform provider.

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AirStrip Technologies, a company known for its mobile patient monitoring solutions, announced recently a new addition to its platform that allows real-time access to Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems.

“For the first time, within a single mobile solution, physicians have real-time access to medical device data such as ECG waveforms as well as all other current and historical patient information imperative to clinical decision-making but formerly locked away in difficult to access, often disparate records repositories,” the company explained in a press release.

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It’s been announced that Allscripts and MyCareTeam (MCT) have launched a new integrated diabetes management solution that will integrate the latter’s application with Allscript’s Enterprise EHR platform.

Patients will leverage “MCT-Clinical for Diabetes,” which after being combined with Allscript’s Electronic Health Records system, will transmit blood glucose readings directly from patient’s glucose meters, along with blood pressure, weight, vital signs, caloric intake and exercise to a central web-based database.  With the Allscripts integration, this data automatically connects to the Allscripts Enterprise EHR, and can create user-defined alerts that are routed to a diabetes educator, a care manager, a nurse, the patient’s primary care physician or, if serious enough, an endocrinologist.  This process facilitates remote monitoring and coaching, increases user compliance with protocols, and most important, based on early results from UMASS and other studies, reduces hospitalizations.

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ChartLogic, a company known for its EHR suite that spans Electronic Medical Records, patient portals, billing/document management and patient education solutions, has announced a new voice recognition overlay technology designed for compatibility with all leading EHR systems.

Called “Stella,” the new solution works similar to Apple’s Siri personal assistant by leveraging the same type of cloud-based natural language processing (NLP) technology to “greatly speed workflow for physicians by enabling them to use iPads, iPhones and other mobile devices with their hospital’s EHR system.”  Voice recognition has long had a place in the healthcare space, and with the proliferation of mobile devices the concept is finally coming to fruition.

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The folks behind the Health 2.0 Conference together with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Innovation (ONC) have launched three new “Investing in Innovation” (i2) Initiative competitions that challenge developer communities to develop innovative health information technology (HIT) solutions.

Like many of the previous competitions we’ve seen from various government agencies and private organizations, the new i2 programs promote the use of technology to “drive better outcomes, engage users in their health and improve healthcare quality.”  The three new challenges being introduced are the “Health Innovations in Commuting Challenge,” “Discharge Follow-Up Appointment Challenge” and the “EHR Accessibility Module Challenge.”

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A new report out of the U.K is praising the telehealth program sponsored by the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA) — which is the largest telehealth project in the world — while also asking the question of why telehealth hasn’t gained more momentum and adoption across the U.S. healthcare system.

The new report, published by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), touts the VHA’s telehealth program as a prime example of how telehealth services should be rolled out on such a large scale.  Patients enrolled in the program — most of whom have chronic conditions such as heart failure, COPD, hypertension, diabetes, and post-traumatic stress disorder — receive free telemonitoring equipment and attention from care coordinators who teach them how to manage their own care.

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