Lantana Group Blog

Kristin Schrock, Technical Writer

I first thought SAS was a coding program used for cleaning up and validating large amounts of data and for generating reports. Since I had never coded before, it seemed too complicated, and I thought I could just use Excel as a data analysis tool. But SAS is more efficient than manually validating data or…

When I was growing up, I wanted to become a veterinarian because I love animals. However, when I was twelve, my grandfather, who had a chronic health condition, came down with influenza A and passed away after only three days in the hospital. As my family sat with him, the nurses came in to monitor his condition frequently to make him comfortable. Their compassionate care to him was wonderful, but they didn’t just care for him.

I always knew I wanted to become a nurse. I wanted to save the world by helping others, and as a young adult, I thought helping others always meant being at the patient’s side.

Growing up, my role models were family friends who were registered nurses. They were compassionate and confident. I wanted to be like them. After graduating nursing school, I went to work in surgical ICU. Looking back now, I realize I have always relied on and have learned to trust technology even when it was electronic devices connected to my ICU patients.

I took an indirect path to nursing informatics. I started on my journey early—as a candy striper volunteer in a tertiary care center at the age of 13. This experience was my first contact with patients in a hospital setting.

Over the past 25 years, my nursing journey has taken me down different professional paths. At each crossroad in my career, I used the Servant Leadership philosophy as my compass to guide my journey. During my master’s program in nursing, I read Servant Leadership in Nursing by Mary Elizabeth O’Brien. I was finally able to put a…

As a former home health nurse, I know firsthand the importance of real-time patient health information. Today’s nurses can easily document and upload information that is instantaneously accessible to other health team members. But it wasn’t always so. When I was starting out, documenting an initial assessment and care plan for a new home health…

Today, as a Senior Nurse Informaticist at Lantana, I am part of a team of clinical, program and policy analysts, working with IT engineers to develop standards-based solutions permitting interoperable—platform independent—exchange of health information. Twenty-five years ago, I was a young nurse starting out—just look at me here at my “capping and pinning” ceremony! Here…

All around the world, May 12 is celebrated as International Nurses Day. It marks the end, in the U.S., of National Nurses Week—a time to honor and recognize nurses for their contribution to health care. May 12 is also the birthday of Florence Nightingale, the nineteenth-century English nurse who became legendary for her work…

The PGHD Revolution With the rise in popularity of mobile health apps and wearable technology, the volume of patient-generated health data (PGHD) is rapidly outpacing providers’ ability to incorporate it into care. In fact, almost half of U.S. smart phone owners report using a mobile health tracking app. These new technologies create data…

AUR is more than an airport code for a commune in southern France (Aurillac, if you are curious). AUR is an important facet of public health. Using the Antimicrobial Use and Resistance (AUR) reporting module, hospitals can report and analyze antimicrobial use and/or resistance data.

The Clinical Quality Language is a new expression language that defines logic for quality artifacts. With its introduction into eCQMs, the industry has taken the first step towards a harmonized standards landscape.

Ongoing research examines the impact of applying sociodemographic status (SDS) risk-adjustment to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) quality reporting programs. The main driver for investigation is a community assertion that SDS risk-adjustment is necessary to accurately gauge the quality of care given to patients of diverse backgrounds. Contrary to popular belief, recent research produced evidence that SDS risk-adjustment has little to no impact on hospital performance ratings.

Co-authored by: Edward P. Ambinder, MD Jeremy L. Warner, MD The cancer journey, from diagnosis to treatment to survivorship, involves multiple interventions and stakeholders. Survivorship begins after completing a bulk of the definitive treatment, and addresses psychosocial developments, as well as late medical issues, resulting from treatment. In 2014, the American Society of Clinical Oncology…

The Long-Term and Post-Acute Care (LTPAC) Health IT (HIT) Collaborative held its 10th Annual Summit in Baltimore at the end of June. HIT leaders, policy makers, providers, and vendors, convened to discuss industry initiatives and priorities from the Collaborative’s latest Roadmap for Health IT in LTPAC. We participated in and attended several sessions on continuity of care and quality reporting.

A template’s inaugural design often doesn’t seem like a “version”. It is difficult for designers while working closely to solve a problem, to envision that someday, perhaps even in the not too distant future, the solution they are in the midst of creating will need to change. And so it is with templates.

The Health IT Policy Committee’s Certification and Adoption Workgroup recently held a virtual hearing on a proposed long-term and post-acute care (LTPAC) certification program.

Crystal Kallem, RHIA, CPHQ, will review the current state and vision for quality measurement and the role of foundational quality specifications that are requirements in Meaningful Use Stage 2.

Several proposals have come forward to augment HL7 Consolidated CDA with additional templates. The Structured Documents Work Group has taken the position that new templates supporting long term care will be added in an addendum rather than integrated into a new release of the spec. I think this position needs to be reconsidered both as a general course and for the specific material. Here’s why.

If the official title of the Consolidation Project is looongg, that is in part why it is exciting – there are many hands involved here, and we expect to make light work of a number of important tasks.