Health systems are moving to implement comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) systems, or significant pieces of them, in the belief that EMR can be integrated into clinical practice and lead to improved patient outcomes and enhanced safety. There are substantial roadblocks to implementing EMR, including significant cost, the competency needed to implement, the political environment, orga...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Among children's hospitals, little is known about how barriers to electronic health record (EHR) adoption are related to meaningful use (MU) incentives. We investigated hospital success with MU incentive payments and determined associations with hospital-reported challenges and characteristics. METHODS A survey administered to 224 Children's Hospital Association hospi...

BACKGROUND Incentives offered by the U.S. government have spurred marked increases in use of health information technology (IT). PURPOSE To update previous reviews and examine recent evidence that relates health IT functionalities prescribed in meaningful use regulations to key aspects of health care. DATA SOURCES English-language articles in PubMed from January 2010 to August 2013. STUDY...

The adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) are key objectives of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan (1). This brief uses data from the American Hospital Association to describe trends in adoption of EHR technology among non-federal acute care hospitals from 2008 to 2015. It tra...

BACKGROUND Given relatively less favorable health outcomes in rural Alabama, electronic health records (EHRs) have an even greater potential to improve quality and alleviate disparities if meaningfully used. OBJECTIVES We examined rural-urban differences as it pertained to perceived barriers, benefits, and motivating factors of EHR implementation. METHODS We used multivariate logistic model...

The objective of this study was to identify factors associated with hospitals that achieved the Medicare meaningful use incentive thresholds for payment under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009. We employed a cross-sectional design using data from the 2011 American Hospital Association Annual Survey, including the Information Technology Suppl...

Electronic health record (EHR) system holds great promise in transforming healthcare. Existing empirical literature typically focused on its adoption, and found mixed evidence on whether EHR improves care. The federal initiative for meaningful use (MU) of EHR aims to maximize the potential of quality improvement, yet there is little empirical study on the impact of the initiative and, more broa...

The concept of significant digits is often used in connection with rounding. Rounding to n significant digits is a more general-purpose technique than rounding to n decimal places, since it handles numbers of different scales in a uniform way. For example, the population of a city might only be known to the nearest thousand and be stated as 52,000, while the population of a country might only b...

We introduce the concept of perceptually meaningful image editing and present two techniques for manipulating the apparent depth of objects in an image. The user loads an image, selects an object and specifies whether the object should appear closer or further away. The system automatically determines target values for the object and/or background that achieve the desired depth change. These de...