Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1076559
36 CIO / HEALTH IT 4 questions to assess whether blockchain 'makes sense' at your hospital By Jessica Kim Cohen D avid Houlding, chair of the HIMSS Blockchain in Health- care Task Force, shared a set of guiding questions he sug- gested healthcare leaders ask themselves when assessing a new blockchain project. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society formed the task force to provide best practices related blockchain, a permanent and decentralized ledger of online transactions or exchanges. Unlike a traditional da- tabase that is centrally located and maintained by one party, a block- chain record is shared among a network of users. "Our strong recommendation from the task force is to target ex- isting business-to-business net- works or consortiums where you already have organizations col- laborating," Mr. Houlding said in a Dec. 5 HIMSS blog post. Along with his role as chair of the task force, Mr. Houlding serves as princi- pal healthcare lead at Microsoft. Here are four questions for health- care leaders to ask themselves be- fore determining whether a block- chain project will "make sense" within their organization, accord- ing to Mr. Houlding: 1. Is it grounded in business values? 2. Are there multiple organizations involved? 3. Does it work well with other en- terprise systems? 4. Is it a complement to your current processes? n GE files IPO to spin out its health unit: 5 things to know By Julie Spitzer G eneral Electric confidentially filed to take its healthcare unit public, progressing its plans to spin the company out into a separate entity, Bloomberg reported. Here are five things to know: 1. GE revealed plans to spin off its healthcare business into a standalone enterprise in June, concluding a yearlong strategic review of the company's operations and financial strength. 2. e company is working with Goldman Sachs Group, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley for the initial public offering. 3. A GE representative declined to comment on the Bloomberg report, but shares of the com- pany rose 2.9 percent in U.S. premarket trading Dec. 19. 4. "As we announced in June, as an independent global healthcare business, we will have great- er flexibility to pursue future growth opportunities, react quickly to changes in the industry and invest in innovation," GE told the publication. 5. If GE takes its health unit public, it would be one of the largest in the world at an enterprise value — including debt — of $65 billion to $70 billion, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Karen Ubelhart said in June. n Tablets, inpatient portals for patients linked with lower readmission rates, study finds By Julie Spitzer O ffering patients access to an inpatient portal is correlated with lower 30- day readmission rates, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. A team of researchers enrolled 426 English- or Spanish-speaking patients from two cardiac medical-surgical units at an urban academic medical center for the study, and divided the participants into three groups: tablet with an inpatient por- tal, tablet with general internet access and no intervention. The inpatient portals offered patients access to their EHR data, along with general internet access. Patients who were offered a tablet with an inpatient portal experienced lower 30- day hospital readmission rates at 5.5 percent, compared to 12.9 percent for the tablet-only group and 13.5 percent for the usual care group. Patients in the inpatient portal group were more likely to use the tablet to look up health information online (89.6 percent) compared to the tablet-only group (51.8 percent). "Healthcare providers reported that patients found the portal useful and that the portal did not negatively impact healthcare delivery," the study reads. "These re- sults illustrate [the] benefit of providing hospitalized patients with real-time access to their electronic health record data while in the hospital." n