The justices on Tuesday let stand a state court ruling that said federal laws protecting health record privacy don't prevent Legal Aid of West Virginia from reviewing patient files at the state's two psychiatric hospitals.

This potential of electronic health records to transform health care sparked federal policymakers in 2009 to create an incentive program offering up to 27 billion to encourage doctors and hospitals to switch to EHRs from paper charts. Since 2008, the proportion of medical practices using electronic health records has soared from around 15 percent to more than 80 percent. Nearly all Medicare-accepting hospitals have adopted their use, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and those that don't face a substantial financial penalty.

So how do we form that foundation? A good approach to any new technology is to learn by doing--not in the hospital when you're in a time crunch and the constant priority of patient care weighs on your shoulders, but in a classroom where you can click on any button your heart desires. Most EHR classes are taught by an instructor at the front of the room who runs through a list of step-by-step instructions. Now imagine instead a class where medical students are given a patient scenario to recreate in a practice environment. They're put in a group of student colleagues, for example a pharmacy student, a student of social work, and a nursing student.

Most of us have heard this word regularly in recent times. Inadequate testing of COVID-19 patients has resulted in under-reporting of cases across the world. This also puts the healthy population at risk of getting infected. Now, what if we can predict the chances of a person being infected with a disease using previous clinical data? This is where predictive modeling comes into the picture.

In the visualization "The Final Years," Nick Stepro of Arcadia Healthcare Solutions used data from the Arcadia Benchmark Database and data from electronic health records and insurance claims to visualize the last year of life for more than 2,000 patients. Most patients died either at home or at the hospital. Home was the cheapest place to die, looking at expenses for the last year of life, while the patients who died in the emergency room had the lowest number of conditions.