Beacon News
April 04, 2013
Attention Providers!
The Hawai‘i Island Beacon Community offers a toolkit of resources that can be customized to your practice. The downloadable kit provides policy and form templates to support active participation in a Health Information Exchange and ensure that your practice is following the standards for privacy of individually identifiable health information under the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Download the full toolkit or view the contents in the sidebar of the ‘For Providers’ page of this website. Contact us with any questions or for more information.
January 20, 2013
2012 Annual Report
The Hawai‘i Island Beacon Community has released our 2012 Annual Report, a comprehensive look into our journey of building and strengthening Health IT, developing innovative approaches with our partners and measuring the improvements that are emerging. In three focus areas of Health IT, Clinical Transformation and Wellness, the report tells the story about the patients whose lives were changed, the providers who are successfully using technology and the significant changes in the way health care is delivered in our community. Mahalo to all of our collaborators who have made these advances possible. Our journey continues!
December 16, 2012
Better Healthcare Coming our Way on the Big Island
By Hawai‘i Island Beacon Community
Hawaii Tribune-Herald
HILO, Hawai‘i – “I don’t have just one doctor. My regular doctor referred me to a couple of specialists, and I’ve also seen some different doctors in the hospital. And every office I go to, I’m asked the same questions, and fill out the same forms, over and over again. Don’t these people talk to each other?”
The surprising answer is that there is a good chance that they don’t, at least not as effectively and efficiently as you might have thought. Sit with a bunch of doctors, and you’ll hear how old-fashioned the healthcare system is (compared to the computer age that we think we live in), when it comes to making information available when and where it is needed. That can be frustrating for the patient, who may or may not be in a condition to describe vital details. It is equally frustrating for the person giving the care, trying to do the best job possible for each and every patient asking for help, but dealing with lost charts, illegible writing, forgotten data.
November 18, 2012
Healthcare Joins the Growing Paperless Society
By Hawai‘i Island Beacon Community
Hawaii Tribune-Herald
HILO, Hawai‘i – You haven’t been to your Doctor’s office for a while, and when you arrive, you notice a subtle but definite difference—it doesn’t seem quite so crowded. There are still the same number of patients…oh, you know what it is…all those paper files are gone! There used to be wall-to-wall shelves of patients’ records, and one of them was yours. Now, when the nurse takes your blood pressure and temperature, she doesn’t “write down” the “information,” she “enters” the “data” into a machine. And when the Doctor comes in, he isn’t carrying a paper file with your name on it; he’s carrying an iPad or a laptop. What’s going on? Are you even in the right place?
