Ciclosporin, also spelled cyclosporine and cyclosporin, is a calcineurin inhibitor, used as an immunosuppressant medication. It is a natural product. It is taken by mouth or by injection into a vein for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, Crohn's disease, nephrotic syndrome, and in organ transplants to prevent rejection. It is also used as eye drops for keratoconjunctivitis sicca.
Health informatics is the field of science and engineering that aims at developing methods and technologies for the acquisition, processing, and study of patient data, which can come from different sources and modalities, such as electronic health records, diagnostic test results, medical scans. The health domain provides an extremely wide variety of problems that can be tackled using computational techniques.
An electronic health record (EHR) is the systematized collection of patient and population electronically stored health information in a digital format. These records can be shared across different health care settings. Records are shared through network-connected, enterprise-wide information systems or other information networks and exchanges. EHRs may include a range of data, including demographics, medical history, medication and allergies, immunization status, laboratory test results, radiology images, vital signs, personal statistics like age and weight, and billing information.
Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is the second largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School and the largest hospital in the Longwood Medical Area in Boston, Massachusetts. Along with Massachusetts General Hospital, it is one of the two founding members of Mass General Brigham, the largest healthcare provider in Massachusetts. Sunil Eappen serves as the hospital's current president.
A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a health information technology, provides clinicians, staff, patients, or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, to help health and health care. CDSS encompasses a variety of tools to enhance decision-making in the clinical workflow. These tools include computerized alerts and reminders to care providers and patients; clinical guidelines; condition-specific order sets; focused patient data reports and summaries; documentation templates; diagnostic support, and contextually relevant reference information, among other tools. A working definition has been proposed by Robert Hayward of the Centre for Health Evidence: "Clinical decision support systems link health observations with health knowledge to influence health choices by clinicians for improved health care". CDSSs constitute a major topic in artificial intelligence in medicine.
In the healthcare industry, pay for performance (P4P), also known as "value-based purchasing", is a payment model that offers financial incentives to physicians, hospitals, medical groups, and other healthcare providers for meeting certain performance measures. Clinical outcomes, such as longer survival, are difficult to measure, so pay for performance systems usually evaluate process quality and efficiency, such as measuring blood pressure, lowering blood pressure, or counseling patients to stop smoking. This model also penalizes health care providers for poor outcomes, medical errors, or increased costs. Integrated delivery systems where insurers and providers share in the cost are intended to help align incentives for value-based care.
eMedicine is an online clinical medical knowledge base founded in 1996 by Scott Plantz MD FAAEM, Jonathan Adler MD MS FACEP FAAEM, and computer engineer Jeffrey Berezin MS. The fundamental concept was to create a large repository of professional level medical content that could be both updated and accessed continuously to assist in clinical care and physician education. The eMedicine website consists of approximately 6,800 medical topic review articles, each of which is associated with one of 62 clinical subspecialty "textbooks". Pediatrics, for example, has 1,050 articles organized into 14 subspecialty "textbooks" ; the emergency medicine volume has 630 articles and internal medicine has nearly 1,400 articles. If the remainder of the specialty textbooks are added to the total 6800+ articles were created in eMedicine. In addition, the knowledge base includes over 25,000 clinically multimedia files. To create this online content over 11,000 board certified healthcare specialists were recruited and managed in a first generation, proprietary learning management system (LMS). If printed out in hardcopy form, the system's content would total over 1 million pages.
Elizabeth Nabel is an American cardiologist and the current Executive Vice President of Strategy at ModeX Therapeutics in Natick, Massachusetts. Prior to this role, she served as President of Brigham Health and its Brigham and Women's Hospital, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
The medical home, also known as the patient-centered medical home (PCMH), is a team-based health care delivery model led by a health care provider to provide comprehensive and continuous medical care to patients with a goal to obtain maximal health outcomes. It is described in the "Joint Principles" as "an approach to providing comprehensive primary care for children, youth and adults."
Disaster medicine is the area of medical specialization serving the dual areas of providing health care to disaster survivors and providing medically related disaster preparation, disaster planning, disaster response and disaster recovery leadership throughout the disaster life cycle. Disaster medicine specialists provide insight, guidance and expertise on the principles and practice of medicine both in the disaster impact area and healthcare evacuation receiving facilities to emergency management professionals, hospitals, healthcare facilities, communities and governments. The disaster medicine specialist is the liaison between and partner to the medical contingency planner, the emergency management professional, the incident command system, government and policy makers.
Unwarranted variation in health care service delivery refers to medical practice pattern variation that cannot be explained by illness, medical need, or the dictates of evidence-based medicine. It is one of the causes of low value care often ignored by health systems.
Yisrael Safeek is an American physician, author, and healthcare software company executive. For the past three decades, Safeek acted in various roles within the US healthcare system: doctor, medical director, hospital co-owner, Joint Commission surveyor, Malcolm Baldrige Board of Examiners, health system Chief Medical Officer, book author, speaker, and software developer. Safeek made the short list for United States Undersecretary of Health.
NextGen Healthcare, Inc. is an American software and services company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The company develops and sells electronic health record (EHR) software and practice management systems to the healthcare industry. NextGen Healthcare also provides population health, financial management, and clinical solutions for medical and dental practices. On September 7, 2018, Quality Systems, Inc. changed its name to NextGen Healthcare, Inc. and on September 10, their stock ticker symbol changed to NASDAQ: NXGN.
Matthew H. Liang is a physician specializing in social rheumatology, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health, and the Director of Special Projects of the Robert B. Brigham Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases Clinical Research Center which he founded. At the Brigham and Women's Hospital he is Medical Director of Rehabilitation Services. He is a founding faculty of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and a founding faculty of the Clinical Effectiveness Program at the Harvard School of Public Health and is a Study Director in the Veterans Administration Cooperative Studies Program.
A medical scribe is an allied health paraprofessional who specializes in charting physician-patient encounters in real time, such as during medical examinations. They also locate information and patients for physicians and complete forms needed for patient care. Depending on which area of practice the scribe works in, the position may also be called clinical scribe, ER scribe or ED scribe, or just scribe. A scribe is trained in health information management and the use of health information technology to support it. A scribe can work on-site or remotely from a HIPAA-secure facility. Medical scribes who work at an off-site location are known as virtual medical scribes.
Health care quality is a level of value provided by any health care resource, as determined by some measurement. As with quality in other fields, it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. The goal of health care is to provide medical resources of high quality to all who need them; that is, to ensure good quality of life, cure illnesses when possible, to extend life expectancy, and so on. Researchers use a variety of quality measures to attempt to determine health care quality, including counts of a therapy's reduction or lessening of diseases identified by medical diagnosis, a decrease in the number of risk factors which people have following preventive care, or a survey of health indicators in a population who are accessing certain kinds of care.
David Bates is an American-born physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, who is internationally renowned for his work regarding the use of health information technology (HIT) to improve the safety and quality of healthcare, in particular by using Clinical Decision Support. Dr. Bates has done especially important work in the area of medication safety. He began by describing the epidemiology of harm caused by medications, first in hospitalized patients and then in other settings such as the home and nursing homes. Subsequently, he demonstrated that by implementing computerized physician order entry (CPOE), medication safety could be dramatically improved in hospitals. This work led the Leapfrog Group to call CPOE one of the four changes that would most improve the safety of U.S. healthcare. It also helped hospitals to justify investing in electronic health records and in particular, CPOE. Throughout his career, Bates has published over 600 peer reviewed articles and is the most cited researcher in the fields of both patient safety and biomedical informatics, with an h-index of 115. In a 2013 analysis published by the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, he ranked among the top 400 living biomedical researchers of any type. He is currently Editor of the Journal of Patient Safety.
Health data is any data "related to health conditions, reproductive outcomes, causes of death, and quality of life" for an individual or population. Health data includes clinical metrics along with environmental, socioeconomic, and behavioral information pertinent to health and wellness. A plurality of health data are collected and used when individuals interact with health care systems. This data, collected by health care providers, typically includes a record of services received, conditions of those services, and clinical outcomes or information concerning those services. Historically, most health data has been sourced from this framework. The advent of eHealth and advances in health information technology, however, have expanded the collection and use of health data—but have also engendered new security, privacy, and ethical concerns. The increasing collection and use of health data by patients is a major component of digital health.
Federal and state governments, insurance companies and other large medical institutions are heavily promoting the adoption of electronic health records. The US Congress included a formula of both incentives and penalties for EMR/EHR adoption versus continued use of paper records as part of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted as part of the, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Physician burnout has been classified as a psychological syndrome that can be expressed as a prolonged response to due chronic occupational stressors. In the practice of medicine, it has been known to affect a wide variety of individuals from medical students to practicing physicians; although, its impact reaches far beyond that. Because of the toll taken on the healthcare industry, various treatment and prevention strategies have been developed at individual, team, and organizational levels in hopes to seek the best method of addressing this epidemic.
