EHRs

To identify patients with various health challenges and provide those patients with care, Allentown, Pa.-based Lehigh Valley Health Network signed a five-year agreement with CVS Health on May 1, according to Lehigh Valley Business.

Here are seven alerts and tools that hospitals and health systems have recently developed and added to their EHR systems.

Access to a patient portal through the EHR can help improve patients' self management of healthcare services, resulting in increased outpatient appointments and reduced emergency room visits and hospitalizations, according to a recent study published in PLOS One.

Twenty-six Universal Health Services hospitals had limited access to their Cerner-based EHR systems June 21 following "technical problems" at one of the EHR vendor's data centers, Bloomberg reports.

St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital will transition to an Epic EHR to be on the same system as all other Johns Hopkins Medicine entities.

VisualDx, a clinical decision support system for physicians, has joined Epic's App Orchard online marketplace.

EHR medication lists may contain inaccuracies leading to potential threats to patient safety, according to a study published in JAMA Ophthalmology.

Omaha, Neb.-based Creighton University is rebuilding its pharmacy database after an IT error on June 18 deleted patient records, according to Live Well Nebraska.

Limiting orders for gamma glutamyl transferase, an enzyme most commonly found in the liver, tests to only be made from the EHR search engine rather than from lists on the system's main screen can significantly reduce the number test orders…

While there appears to be a rise in false claims cases related to Medicare and Medicaid's EHR Incentive Program, there are some signals healthcare providers and IT personnel can look out for to potentially identify fraud at their organizations.