Growing adoption of electronic health records is expected to complement and boost the use of telehealth initiatives across the country, InformationWeek reports.
Health care organizations are planning to deploy telehealth programs to increase access:
* To certain specialists;
* For patients with conditions that prevent them from traveling; and
* During patient transport, since some conditions require treatment while patients are in transit.
Greater use of EHRs will provide remote specialists with more detailed data about patients. Digital medical images, ranging from picture-archiving systems to digital cameras, also can provide more information to providers.
InformationWeek described several telehealth initiatives, including:
* The use of telemedicine gear — including videos and digital stethoscopes — to help physicians treat pediatric patients in transit to hospitals in the area in and around Cincinnati, Ohio;
* Telestroke, an application that links hospitals without stroke specialists to specialists at other hospitals; and
* An effort to offer telehealth services to employees on-site at company facilities (Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek, 4/27).
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/ehr-use-thought-to-help-boost-adoption-of-telehealth-initiatives/
Friday, April 30, 2010
Transcription Association Releases Highly Anticipated Compliance and Practice Guidelines for Healthcare Documentation and Speech Recognition Adoption
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Industry best practices, corporate transparency, and legal compliance will be the major topics of discussion at the 21st Annual Conference of the Medical Transcription Industry Association (MTIA) April 28 through May 1 in Daytona Beach, Florida. MTIA and its partner organization, the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI), will announce the completion of their Manual of Ethical Best Practices for the Healthcare Documentation Sector at the conference and use the event as an opportunity to highlight the importance of best practices to the future success of the medical transcription industry and profession. Additionally, a speech recognition adoption guide will be released to address the relevance of speech recognition technology as an evolving method of clinical documentation and to present operational and fiscal implications for technology adoption.
Heightened privacy and security requirements, increased calls for transparency of operations, greater reliance on speech recognition technologies, and a growing home-based workforce prompted the need to release these best practice guides. “With the emerging demand from healthcare delivery for increased standardization and greater specificity around exchange of health information, it is time for the healthcare documentation sector to look closely at its compliance practices and at evolving technologies to capture and deliver health information safely and securely,” states MTIA 2010 Board of Directors Chairperson Eileen Dwyer. “We want to be a resource for business owners and users of our services in developing best practices that reflect high-integrity business practices and promote transparency around key issues that reflect well on the industry as a whole.”
The Speech Recognition Adoption Guide is designed to help consumers understand adoption-related issues, impact, terminology, standards, and metrics. In addition, the guide presents unified perspectives of the varying stakeholder groups concerning issues such as documentation quality and risk management.
About MTIA
The Medical Transcription Industry Association (MTIA) is the world’s largest trade association serving medical transcription service organizations.
About AHDI
The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI), is the world’s largest professional society representing the clinical documentation sector whose purpose is to set and uphold standards for education and practice in the field of health data capture and documentation.
Above article publish on http://www.medicaltranscriptionoutsource.com/transcription-association-releases-highly-anticipated-compliance-practice-guidelines-healthcare-documentation-speech-recognition-adoption/
Heightened privacy and security requirements, increased calls for transparency of operations, greater reliance on speech recognition technologies, and a growing home-based workforce prompted the need to release these best practice guides. “With the emerging demand from healthcare delivery for increased standardization and greater specificity around exchange of health information, it is time for the healthcare documentation sector to look closely at its compliance practices and at evolving technologies to capture and deliver health information safely and securely,” states MTIA 2010 Board of Directors Chairperson Eileen Dwyer. “We want to be a resource for business owners and users of our services in developing best practices that reflect high-integrity business practices and promote transparency around key issues that reflect well on the industry as a whole.”
The Speech Recognition Adoption Guide is designed to help consumers understand adoption-related issues, impact, terminology, standards, and metrics. In addition, the guide presents unified perspectives of the varying stakeholder groups concerning issues such as documentation quality and risk management.
About MTIA
The Medical Transcription Industry Association (MTIA) is the world’s largest trade association serving medical transcription service organizations.
About AHDI
The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI), is the world’s largest professional society representing the clinical documentation sector whose purpose is to set and uphold standards for education and practice in the field of health data capture and documentation.
Above article publish on http://www.medicaltranscriptionoutsource.com/transcription-association-releases-highly-anticipated-compliance-practice-guidelines-healthcare-documentation-speech-recognition-adoption/
Simpler medical billing saves $7 billion
BOSTON, April 29 (UPI) — Simplifying and standardizing administrative procedures for medical bills could save about $7 billion a year, U.S. researcher’s estimate.
Bonnie B. Blanchfield of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and colleagues have created a hypothetical model for medical billing that involves a single set of payment rules for multiple payers, a single claim form and standard rules of submission.
If doctors’ offices used the streamlined medical billing system they would save 4 hours a week of physician time and 5 hours a week of staff time, Blanchfield said.
The researchers analyzed the billing system of a physician’s group affiliated with a large, urban, academic teaching hospital. The researchers found 12.6 percent of submitted claims are initially rejected, but 81 percent are eventually paid — after using considerable staff time.
“The savings from reducing administrative complexity could be translated into decreased costs in general,” the study authors said in a statement. “Mandating a single set of rules, a single claim form, standard rules of submission, and transparent payment adjudication-with corresponding savings to both providers and payers-could provide system wide savings that could translate into better care for Americans.”
The findings are published in the journal Health Affairs.
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/simpler-medical-billing-saves-7-billion/
Bonnie B. Blanchfield of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and colleagues have created a hypothetical model for medical billing that involves a single set of payment rules for multiple payers, a single claim form and standard rules of submission.
If doctors’ offices used the streamlined medical billing system they would save 4 hours a week of physician time and 5 hours a week of staff time, Blanchfield said.
The researchers analyzed the billing system of a physician’s group affiliated with a large, urban, academic teaching hospital. The researchers found 12.6 percent of submitted claims are initially rejected, but 81 percent are eventually paid — after using considerable staff time.
“The savings from reducing administrative complexity could be translated into decreased costs in general,” the study authors said in a statement. “Mandating a single set of rules, a single claim form, standard rules of submission, and transparent payment adjudication-with corresponding savings to both providers and payers-could provide system wide savings that could translate into better care for Americans.”
The findings are published in the journal Health Affairs.
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/simpler-medical-billing-saves-7-billion/
Research Shows That Electronic Medical Records Save Babies’ Lives
By Rich Silverman
We talk a lot in this blog about the financial aspects of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), and with good reason – they can entail a substantial investment in time and money. But it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of the purpose of all that investment – to save lives.
There has been a great deal of research conducted into how much it will cost to implement an EMR, yet there has not been a lot of research into their impact on patient outcomes. A recent study shows that the adoption of Electronic Medical Records and Radiology Information Systems (RISs) in hospitals in the U.S. actually lowers infant mortality in this country. Research conducted by Amalia Miller of the University of Virginia and Catherine Ticker of MIT’s Sloan School of Business showed that when hospitals adopt EMRs and RISs, their infant mortality rates drop.
Using data on births and infant mortality already collected by the U.S. Government, and statistics on health care information technology adoption provided by the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the researchers compared infant mortality in selected areas of the country where data was available (privacy laws limited that data pool) with the adoption of EMRs and RISs in those same areas.
After correcting for a wide range of variables, the researchers came to the following conclusions:
The adoption of EMRs by one additional hospital in a county reduces infant mortality by 13%.
The average cost of the HIT used to save that baby is about $450,000.
The reduction of infant mortality is twice as great for African-Americans than non-African-Americans.
The median cost to implement EMR in a hospital, according to a 2007 America Hospital Association study was $5,556 in capital costs per bed and $12,060 per bed per year in maintenance costs.
The authors studied “bare-bones” HIT implementations of EMRs, and only looked at the impact on neonatal and infant health outcomes. They suggest that more robust implementations of HIT, including decision-support and computerized physician order entry, as examples, will extend the beneficial effects of HIT to other classes of patients.
This research serves as a gentle reminder that the HITECH Act was intended to provide incentives for physicians and hospitals to implement and use Electronic Medical Records because EMRs will improve patient outcomes and save lives. This research shows that they do.
Above article publish on http://www.emrspecialists.com/2010/04/research-shows-electronic-medical-records-save-babies-lives/
We talk a lot in this blog about the financial aspects of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), and with good reason – they can entail a substantial investment in time and money. But it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of the purpose of all that investment – to save lives.
There has been a great deal of research conducted into how much it will cost to implement an EMR, yet there has not been a lot of research into their impact on patient outcomes. A recent study shows that the adoption of Electronic Medical Records and Radiology Information Systems (RISs) in hospitals in the U.S. actually lowers infant mortality in this country. Research conducted by Amalia Miller of the University of Virginia and Catherine Ticker of MIT’s Sloan School of Business showed that when hospitals adopt EMRs and RISs, their infant mortality rates drop.
Using data on births and infant mortality already collected by the U.S. Government, and statistics on health care information technology adoption provided by the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the researchers compared infant mortality in selected areas of the country where data was available (privacy laws limited that data pool) with the adoption of EMRs and RISs in those same areas.
After correcting for a wide range of variables, the researchers came to the following conclusions:
The adoption of EMRs by one additional hospital in a county reduces infant mortality by 13%.
The average cost of the HIT used to save that baby is about $450,000.
The reduction of infant mortality is twice as great for African-Americans than non-African-Americans.
The median cost to implement EMR in a hospital, according to a 2007 America Hospital Association study was $5,556 in capital costs per bed and $12,060 per bed per year in maintenance costs.
The authors studied “bare-bones” HIT implementations of EMRs, and only looked at the impact on neonatal and infant health outcomes. They suggest that more robust implementations of HIT, including decision-support and computerized physician order entry, as examples, will extend the beneficial effects of HIT to other classes of patients.
This research serves as a gentle reminder that the HITECH Act was intended to provide incentives for physicians and hospitals to implement and use Electronic Medical Records because EMRs will improve patient outcomes and save lives. This research shows that they do.
Above article publish on http://www.emrspecialists.com/2010/04/research-shows-electronic-medical-records-save-babies-lives/
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
e-Rx growth accelerates, and DEA ruling could spur more adoption
By Neil Versel
Just as predicted at the end of 2008, e-prescribing volume nearly tripled in 2009, according to prescription transaction network Surescripts. And the growth has picked up this year.
Surescripts reports that U.S. prescribers wrote 191 million electronic prescriptions in 2009, up from 68 million a year earlier. That accounts for about 12 percent of all 1.63 billion original prescriptions–not refills–of all scripts written last year. For the first three months of 2010, nearly 20 percent of all new scripts have been filed electronically.
To date, about one-quarter of office-based physicians nationwide have e-prescribing technology, even if they aren’t all using it, Surescripts adds, about twice the rate at the end of 2008.
The rapid growth could further accelerate as the Drug Enforcement Administration moves to lift a restriction on e-prescribing of controlled substances. Last month’s DEA interim final rule “is what we’ve all been waiting for,” Dr. John Halamka tells the Wall Street Journal. “Now we can write prescriptions for Lipitor and Valium on the same program,” adds Halamka, CIO of Boston’s CareGroup Healthcare System and an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
For more information:
- read this Wall Street Journal story, which includes a discussion of the safety benefits of e-prescribing
Above article publish on http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/erx-growth-accelerates-dea-ruling-spur-adoption/
Just as predicted at the end of 2008, e-prescribing volume nearly tripled in 2009, according to prescription transaction network Surescripts. And the growth has picked up this year.
Surescripts reports that U.S. prescribers wrote 191 million electronic prescriptions in 2009, up from 68 million a year earlier. That accounts for about 12 percent of all 1.63 billion original prescriptions–not refills–of all scripts written last year. For the first three months of 2010, nearly 20 percent of all new scripts have been filed electronically.
To date, about one-quarter of office-based physicians nationwide have e-prescribing technology, even if they aren’t all using it, Surescripts adds, about twice the rate at the end of 2008.
The rapid growth could further accelerate as the Drug Enforcement Administration moves to lift a restriction on e-prescribing of controlled substances. Last month’s DEA interim final rule “is what we’ve all been waiting for,” Dr. John Halamka tells the Wall Street Journal. “Now we can write prescriptions for Lipitor and Valium on the same program,” adds Halamka, CIO of Boston’s CareGroup Healthcare System and an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
For more information:
- read this Wall Street Journal story, which includes a discussion of the safety benefits of e-prescribing
Above article publish on http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/erx-growth-accelerates-dea-ruling-spur-adoption/
Ten Keys To A Successful CPOE Implementation
One of the keys to achieving meaningful use and thus being able to qualify for federal incentive payments for the implementation of EMRs is the use of Computerized Physician Order Entry. What exactly is CPOE and how can it be implemented successfully?
CPOE is a program that physicians use to place orders for medications, lab tests, radiology exams, admissions, referrals and other tasks. A CPOE replaces written orders, phone calls and faxes, because it is linked to every other department in the hospital.
The Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ), a unit of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded ten grants to various health care providers to implement CPOE, and studied what happened. Their results show that there are certain things that providers can do to help improve the chances of a successful implementation.
The ten contracts were spread across both urban and rural hospitals in various parts of the country, and were intended for use in implementing inpatient programs. Some CPOE systems were implemented with EMRs, or in addition to existing EMRs, and all of them were put in place in conjunction with a decision support system.
Interviews with the grant recipients revealed that certain factors were critical to the success of a CPOE implementation. Here is a brief summary:
* Training – Frequent training and retraining is critical to a successful implementation.
* Staffing – Staff who understand both IT and clinical science are important. If you don’t have them, hire them or train existing personnel.
* Workflow – CPOE is by nature disruptive, so plan to redesign your workflow to accommodate these changes.
* Resources – Be sure to allocate enough resources (money, time and people) for planning, training, implementation and maintenance.
* Work With Vendors – Have good relations with vendors, but don’t allow them to delay your implementation program. Write penalties into contracts.
* Committees – Create and use Clinical Steering Committees early and often.
* Order Sets – Involve as many clinicians as possible in the creation of order sets, but strike a balance between filled-in fields and default values.
* Interoperability – Good luck with this one. Most of the grantees faced challenges integrating CPOE with other programs. Vendors did not want to cooperate in connecting to other company’s products.
* Support – Support should be available 24/7, especially at the beginning of the implementation. Address problems quickly and completely. Make support easy to access.
* Alert Fatigue – Expect a lot of alerts when you go live, and expect clinicians to find it annoying. Grantees had to develop new techniques to eliminate unnecessary alerts.
The conclusions reached here show that implementing the CPOE component of an EMR will pose challenges that will require creativity and tenacity while you design workarounds, but a successful implementation is possible. It seems to be true that what works for CPOE will work for other components of an EMR implementation.
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/ten-keys-successful-cpoe-implementation/
CPOE is a program that physicians use to place orders for medications, lab tests, radiology exams, admissions, referrals and other tasks. A CPOE replaces written orders, phone calls and faxes, because it is linked to every other department in the hospital.
The Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ), a unit of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded ten grants to various health care providers to implement CPOE, and studied what happened. Their results show that there are certain things that providers can do to help improve the chances of a successful implementation.
The ten contracts were spread across both urban and rural hospitals in various parts of the country, and were intended for use in implementing inpatient programs. Some CPOE systems were implemented with EMRs, or in addition to existing EMRs, and all of them were put in place in conjunction with a decision support system.
Interviews with the grant recipients revealed that certain factors were critical to the success of a CPOE implementation. Here is a brief summary:
* Training – Frequent training and retraining is critical to a successful implementation.
* Staffing – Staff who understand both IT and clinical science are important. If you don’t have them, hire them or train existing personnel.
* Workflow – CPOE is by nature disruptive, so plan to redesign your workflow to accommodate these changes.
* Resources – Be sure to allocate enough resources (money, time and people) for planning, training, implementation and maintenance.
* Work With Vendors – Have good relations with vendors, but don’t allow them to delay your implementation program. Write penalties into contracts.
* Committees – Create and use Clinical Steering Committees early and often.
* Order Sets – Involve as many clinicians as possible in the creation of order sets, but strike a balance between filled-in fields and default values.
* Interoperability – Good luck with this one. Most of the grantees faced challenges integrating CPOE with other programs. Vendors did not want to cooperate in connecting to other company’s products.
* Support – Support should be available 24/7, especially at the beginning of the implementation. Address problems quickly and completely. Make support easy to access.
* Alert Fatigue – Expect a lot of alerts when you go live, and expect clinicians to find it annoying. Grantees had to develop new techniques to eliminate unnecessary alerts.
The conclusions reached here show that implementing the CPOE component of an EMR will pose challenges that will require creativity and tenacity while you design workarounds, but a successful implementation is possible. It seems to be true that what works for CPOE will work for other components of an EMR implementation.
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/ten-keys-successful-cpoe-implementation/
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
NIST Begins Rolling Out EHR Performance Testing Program
By Rich Silverman
There are hundreds and hundreds of Electronic Health Record software packages in the marketplace that claim to be capable of allowing you to establish meaningful use, but how do you know if those claims are true? So far there has not been an impartial, independent way to determine the truthfulness of a vendor’s claims.
Earlier this month, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) rolled out the first part of its testing infrastructure, created in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), vendors, implementers, standards organizations and certification bodies. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) designated NIST as the agency responsible for determining if EHRs meet HHS standards for functionality, interoperability and technical benchmarks.
According to Bettijoyce Lide, NIST’s senior advisor, program coordinator for Health IT, speaking to Information Week Magazine, the goal is to establish a health IT infrastructure that provides a high level of security to American’s electronic medical records. “New test methods, along with testing infrastructure, certification, security and usability help ensure that the health information of Americans is exchanged safely, securely, reliably, and only to appropriate sources,” she said.
NIST created the test procedures and infrastructure based on the Interim Final Requirements (IFR) published by HHS on January 13th of this year. If those requirements change, NIST says it will change its test procedures accordingly. Plans call for tests to be rolled out in four waves.
Fifteen test drafts have been rolled out so far, each keyed to a specific requirement as spelled out in the IFR. As an example, test criteria 170.302(b) relates to maintaining an up-to-date problem list, a key meaningful use requirement. The test will determine if the program will “enable a user to electronically record, modify, and retrieve a patient’s problem list for longitudinal care in accordance with (1),the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(A), or, (2) at a minimum, the version of the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(B).”
Other tests will evaluate a product’s ability to maintain allergy and medication lists, calculate body mass index (BMI) and track among history. Additional tests will be rolled out over the coming weeks.
To keep stakeholders informed about the full extent of NIST’s activities in the health care certification arena, NIST has set up a special website with links to all of its major activities: infrastructure creation, test methods, conformance testing, and testing and support. The overall program can be used by vendors to determine if their products will meet standards before it submits them for certification, and will be used by approved certification bodies to test those product offerings.
This NIST program puts into place one of the final pieces of the certification puzzle. It will enable you to determine if a product which claims to be certified will actually perform the functions it says it can perform, because it has been tested and proven to meet the standards set forth by the HITECH Act and the definition of meaningful use.
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/nist-begins-rolling-out-ehr-performance-testing-program/
There are hundreds and hundreds of Electronic Health Record software packages in the marketplace that claim to be capable of allowing you to establish meaningful use, but how do you know if those claims are true? So far there has not been an impartial, independent way to determine the truthfulness of a vendor’s claims.
Earlier this month, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) rolled out the first part of its testing infrastructure, created in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), vendors, implementers, standards organizations and certification bodies. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) designated NIST as the agency responsible for determining if EHRs meet HHS standards for functionality, interoperability and technical benchmarks.
According to Bettijoyce Lide, NIST’s senior advisor, program coordinator for Health IT, speaking to Information Week Magazine, the goal is to establish a health IT infrastructure that provides a high level of security to American’s electronic medical records. “New test methods, along with testing infrastructure, certification, security and usability help ensure that the health information of Americans is exchanged safely, securely, reliably, and only to appropriate sources,” she said.
NIST created the test procedures and infrastructure based on the Interim Final Requirements (IFR) published by HHS on January 13th of this year. If those requirements change, NIST says it will change its test procedures accordingly. Plans call for tests to be rolled out in four waves.
Fifteen test drafts have been rolled out so far, each keyed to a specific requirement as spelled out in the IFR. As an example, test criteria 170.302(b) relates to maintaining an up-to-date problem list, a key meaningful use requirement. The test will determine if the program will “enable a user to electronically record, modify, and retrieve a patient’s problem list for longitudinal care in accordance with (1),the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(A), or, (2) at a minimum, the version of the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(B).”
Other tests will evaluate a product’s ability to maintain allergy and medication lists, calculate body mass index (BMI) and track among history. Additional tests will be rolled out over the coming weeks.
To keep stakeholders informed about the full extent of NIST’s activities in the health care certification arena, NIST has set up a special website with links to all of its major activities: infrastructure creation, test methods, conformance testing, and testing and support. The overall program can be used by vendors to determine if their products will meet standards before it submits them for certification, and will be used by approved certification bodies to test those product offerings.
This NIST program puts into place one of the final pieces of the certification puzzle. It will enable you to determine if a product which claims to be certified will actually perform the functions it says it can perform, because it has been tested and proven to meet the standards set forth by the HITECH Act and the definition of meaningful use.
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/nist-begins-rolling-out-ehr-performance-testing-program/
Health Affairs: About 80% of EMR users meet some meaningful use criteria
Filed Under (EHR, EMR, Electronic Medical Records) by admin
Between 75-85 percent of physicians with EHRs are already using functions that meet some of the proposed criteria for demonstrating meaningful use, according to analysis from Seth O. Hogan, survey director, and Stephanie M. Kissam, health services research associate, at RTI International in Chicago.
The authors of the survey, published in the April edition of Health Affairs, said their analysis contributes new information about the rates at which primary care physicians, medical specialists and surgical specialists who had a basic EHR system used specific functions before the passage of the stimulus law, compared to the level of expected meaningful use of EHRs set forth in the proposed federal regulations.
“Among physicians who had key functions available to them, 75-85 percent reported using functions in the patient record category. These functions included organizing patient information such as sex and date of birth, lists of medications taken by the patient, problem lists or the current diagnoses of patients and clinical notes,” wrote the authors.
A stratified random sample of 5,000 U.S. office-based physicians was drawn from the American Medical Association’s Physicians Masterfile where, after 516 were determined as ineligible, 2,758 of the 4,484 eligible physicians completed the surveys during a data collection period from August 2007 to February 2008, yielding a 62 percent response rate.
The authors sorted completed interviews by whether physicians reported having a basic EHR system, meaning that it offers practitioners, at minimum, the following functions: the ability to record patient demographics, including name, address and sex, inclusion of patient problem lists, clinical notes, patient medication lists, and orders for prescriptions and electronic viewing of laboratory and imaging results. “Applying these criteria resulted in a sample of 485 physicians eligible for analysis,” the authors noted.
Fewer than one in five physicians reported having at least a basic EHR system, the survey found. Of those who did, primary care physicians were the most likely to report having a basic EHR system (19.4 percent). Medical specialists were the next group most likely to have a basic EHR system (17.1 percent) followed by surgeons (16.7 percent). “Availability of additional EHR functions, beyond those defined in a basic system, varied across all physician groups,” the authors wrote.
The use of these basic functions did not differ significantly by broad medical specialty yet the authors reported these data to provide baselines for tracking changes by specialty groups over time.
According to the survey, 79 percent of 306 responding physicians whose EHR systems had warnings for drug-to-drug interactions used this function. For information exchange functions, the authors also reported on the use of sending prescriptions electronically (79 percent of 265 respondents whose records had this function) and submitting laboratory orders electronically (used by 64 percent of 256 respondents whose records had this function).
“Public health reporting functions were less commonly used among the small number of physicians who had those functions available to them,” the authors wrote. In addition, only 27.6 percent of the 128 responding physicians said they could provide at least 10 percent of unique patients with timely electronic access to their health information, the authors found.
“To qualify for new federal funds intended to promote the widespread adoption and use of EHRs, U.S. physician practices must meet the government’s meaningful use benchmarks,” concluded the authors. “Tracking the use of EHRs across different types of providers will be a critical component in evaluating how their use affects healthcare costs, quality and safety and overall population health measures.”
Above article publish on http://www.emrspecialists.com/2010/04/health-affairs-80-emr-users-meet-meaningful-criteria/
Between 75-85 percent of physicians with EHRs are already using functions that meet some of the proposed criteria for demonstrating meaningful use, according to analysis from Seth O. Hogan, survey director, and Stephanie M. Kissam, health services research associate, at RTI International in Chicago.
The authors of the survey, published in the April edition of Health Affairs, said their analysis contributes new information about the rates at which primary care physicians, medical specialists and surgical specialists who had a basic EHR system used specific functions before the passage of the stimulus law, compared to the level of expected meaningful use of EHRs set forth in the proposed federal regulations.
“Among physicians who had key functions available to them, 75-85 percent reported using functions in the patient record category. These functions included organizing patient information such as sex and date of birth, lists of medications taken by the patient, problem lists or the current diagnoses of patients and clinical notes,” wrote the authors.
A stratified random sample of 5,000 U.S. office-based physicians was drawn from the American Medical Association’s Physicians Masterfile where, after 516 were determined as ineligible, 2,758 of the 4,484 eligible physicians completed the surveys during a data collection period from August 2007 to February 2008, yielding a 62 percent response rate.
The authors sorted completed interviews by whether physicians reported having a basic EHR system, meaning that it offers practitioners, at minimum, the following functions: the ability to record patient demographics, including name, address and sex, inclusion of patient problem lists, clinical notes, patient medication lists, and orders for prescriptions and electronic viewing of laboratory and imaging results. “Applying these criteria resulted in a sample of 485 physicians eligible for analysis,” the authors noted.
Fewer than one in five physicians reported having at least a basic EHR system, the survey found. Of those who did, primary care physicians were the most likely to report having a basic EHR system (19.4 percent). Medical specialists were the next group most likely to have a basic EHR system (17.1 percent) followed by surgeons (16.7 percent). “Availability of additional EHR functions, beyond those defined in a basic system, varied across all physician groups,” the authors wrote.
The use of these basic functions did not differ significantly by broad medical specialty yet the authors reported these data to provide baselines for tracking changes by specialty groups over time.
According to the survey, 79 percent of 306 responding physicians whose EHR systems had warnings for drug-to-drug interactions used this function. For information exchange functions, the authors also reported on the use of sending prescriptions electronically (79 percent of 265 respondents whose records had this function) and submitting laboratory orders electronically (used by 64 percent of 256 respondents whose records had this function).
“Public health reporting functions were less commonly used among the small number of physicians who had those functions available to them,” the authors wrote. In addition, only 27.6 percent of the 128 responding physicians said they could provide at least 10 percent of unique patients with timely electronic access to their health information, the authors found.
“To qualify for new federal funds intended to promote the widespread adoption and use of EHRs, U.S. physician practices must meet the government’s meaningful use benchmarks,” concluded the authors. “Tracking the use of EHRs across different types of providers will be a critical component in evaluating how their use affects healthcare costs, quality and safety and overall population health measures.”
Above article publish on http://www.emrspecialists.com/2010/04/health-affairs-80-emr-users-meet-meaningful-criteria/
Providers will attest to meaningful use via CMS registration system
By Neil Versel
If nothing else, it should at least be easy to register to receive federal incentive payments for meaningful use of EMRs.
CMS has awarded a $1.6 million contract to CGI Federal, a Fairfax, Va.-based unit of Montreal-based technology consulting firm CGI Group, to revise the existing Provider Enrollment Chain Ownership System (PECOS) so physicians and hospitals can attest to meeting the requirements for meaningful use that will qualify them for Medicare bonuses. PECOS currently manages and verifies enrollment of Medicare providers and vendors.
Build-out of the online system to accommodate EMR incentive enrollment should take about 10 months, CMS says. Hospitals, however, could be eligible for the bonuses as soon as the end of December, since the rules for meaningful use, as currently proposed, only requires providers to meet the standards for 90 consecutive days in 2011. Medicare Part A, which applies to inpatient care, follows the federal fiscal year, which begins Oct.1.
For more information:
- see this Government Health IT story
- read this CMS notice about the contract award
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/providers-attest-meaningful-cms-registration-system/
If nothing else, it should at least be easy to register to receive federal incentive payments for meaningful use of EMRs.
CMS has awarded a $1.6 million contract to CGI Federal, a Fairfax, Va.-based unit of Montreal-based technology consulting firm CGI Group, to revise the existing Provider Enrollment Chain Ownership System (PECOS) so physicians and hospitals can attest to meeting the requirements for meaningful use that will qualify them for Medicare bonuses. PECOS currently manages and verifies enrollment of Medicare providers and vendors.
Build-out of the online system to accommodate EMR incentive enrollment should take about 10 months, CMS says. Hospitals, however, could be eligible for the bonuses as soon as the end of December, since the rules for meaningful use, as currently proposed, only requires providers to meet the standards for 90 consecutive days in 2011. Medicare Part A, which applies to inpatient care, follows the federal fiscal year, which begins Oct.1.
For more information:
- see this Government Health IT story
- read this CMS notice about the contract award
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/providers-attest-meaningful-cms-registration-system/
Friday, April 23, 2010
Using A Medical Billing Software Can Increase Your Revenues Overnight
By Gen Wright
Health facilities are busy places and one error in the request-handling queue can be disastrous for the day’s business. This is when everything goes haywire and nothing quite works out. Clients are screaming about the mismanagement and the staff is trying desperately to fix things and find the missing report. Has this ever happened to you? It happens to database intensive businesses like medical centers time and again. If it hasn’t happened to you, you are still running a risk of this impending disaster happening right in front of you. Taking such avoidable risks are not a good idea. You should upgrade to a good medical billing software and streamline your operations. It makes a lot of business sense to do this. First, you can take care of those screaming patients by eliminating the chances of all such problems happening. You can control the entire process from a central server and everything can be automated. So when a query is sent, the data is retrieved from your central computer and everything goes smoothly. There is no waiting to see if a slot is empty. Cancellations are handled automatically and the person next in line is upgraded to get the appointment. You have no loss of time, money or resources and most importantly, patients are kept happy and satisfied. They keep on coming back to you and your business grows. After installing the medical billing software, you can finally digitize a lot of your data and you can finally get rid of those mountains of paperwork regularly. Not only will it save your tangible operational costs, it will also make your establishment eco-friendly by giving you a smaller carbon footprint. This can easily be another point for marketing your health care facility and it might earn you some good reviews as well. The medical billing software works efficiently and at a very high-speed. So you can speed up the entire operations process, giving your staff and yourself a much needed relief. And still, you will be able to handle more queries per day than ever before. Here is another opportunity to make your business grow. It will allow you to grant your patients a world-class medical service that they deserve and still be able to keep your margins high and thus make the entire establishment more profitable. With medical billing software in place, you can also aim at a strategic downsizing of your establishment. This is because the new-age medical billing software needs fewer operators than your older system. Thus, you can save more costs that way and it will add to your overall revenue. The medical billing software supports full customization and branding of your receipts and slips. You can use the same template as you were using before without any problem whatsoever. You thus get to keep your branding intact and still be able to upgrade to a much more advanced system. So if you own a health care and/or medical facility, what are you waiting for? This is the missing key to your exponential growth and success. Get medical billing software today!
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/medical-billing-software-increase-revenues-overnight/
Health facilities are busy places and one error in the request-handling queue can be disastrous for the day’s business. This is when everything goes haywire and nothing quite works out. Clients are screaming about the mismanagement and the staff is trying desperately to fix things and find the missing report. Has this ever happened to you? It happens to database intensive businesses like medical centers time and again. If it hasn’t happened to you, you are still running a risk of this impending disaster happening right in front of you. Taking such avoidable risks are not a good idea. You should upgrade to a good medical billing software and streamline your operations. It makes a lot of business sense to do this. First, you can take care of those screaming patients by eliminating the chances of all such problems happening. You can control the entire process from a central server and everything can be automated. So when a query is sent, the data is retrieved from your central computer and everything goes smoothly. There is no waiting to see if a slot is empty. Cancellations are handled automatically and the person next in line is upgraded to get the appointment. You have no loss of time, money or resources and most importantly, patients are kept happy and satisfied. They keep on coming back to you and your business grows. After installing the medical billing software, you can finally digitize a lot of your data and you can finally get rid of those mountains of paperwork regularly. Not only will it save your tangible operational costs, it will also make your establishment eco-friendly by giving you a smaller carbon footprint. This can easily be another point for marketing your health care facility and it might earn you some good reviews as well. The medical billing software works efficiently and at a very high-speed. So you can speed up the entire operations process, giving your staff and yourself a much needed relief. And still, you will be able to handle more queries per day than ever before. Here is another opportunity to make your business grow. It will allow you to grant your patients a world-class medical service that they deserve and still be able to keep your margins high and thus make the entire establishment more profitable. With medical billing software in place, you can also aim at a strategic downsizing of your establishment. This is because the new-age medical billing software needs fewer operators than your older system. Thus, you can save more costs that way and it will add to your overall revenue. The medical billing software supports full customization and branding of your receipts and slips. You can use the same template as you were using before without any problem whatsoever. You thus get to keep your branding intact and still be able to upgrade to a much more advanced system. So if you own a health care and/or medical facility, what are you waiting for? This is the missing key to your exponential growth and success. Get medical billing software today!
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/medical-billing-software-increase-revenues-overnight/
E-Prescribing Expected To Rise in Wake of DEA Rule, CMS Incentives
Health care industry experts expect recent policy changes to spur more physicians to start prescribing medications electronically in the coming years, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Trends in E-Prescribing
A recent report from the electronic prescribing network Surescripts found that the number of prescriptions submitted electronically increased from 68 million in 2008 to 191 million in 2009. According to Surescripts, about 25% of all office-based physicians have the technology necessary to e-prescribe.
Policy Changes
Last year, CMS started providing physicians with incentive payments for e-prescribing. Starting in 2012, CMS will begin penalizing physicians that have not adopted e-prescribing systems.
Meanwhile, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s new final rule easing restrictions on e-prescribing for controlled substances is expected to contribute to an uptick in e-prescriptions. The rule allows physicians to e-prescribe for most medications, rather than maintain a separate paper process for controlled substances.
Concerns
Some health care providers and experts have cautioned that e-prescribing does involve certain risks.
For example, some physicians have reported prescription errors that resulted from pressing the wrong computer key when filling out drug and dosage information (Martin, Wall Street Journal, 4/20).
Above article publish on http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/eprescribing-expected-rise-wake-dea-rule-cms-incentives/
Trends in E-Prescribing
A recent report from the electronic prescribing network Surescripts found that the number of prescriptions submitted electronically increased from 68 million in 2008 to 191 million in 2009. According to Surescripts, about 25% of all office-based physicians have the technology necessary to e-prescribe.
Policy Changes
Last year, CMS started providing physicians with incentive payments for e-prescribing. Starting in 2012, CMS will begin penalizing physicians that have not adopted e-prescribing systems.
Meanwhile, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s new final rule easing restrictions on e-prescribing for controlled substances is expected to contribute to an uptick in e-prescriptions. The rule allows physicians to e-prescribe for most medications, rather than maintain a separate paper process for controlled substances.
Concerns
Some health care providers and experts have cautioned that e-prescribing does involve certain risks.
For example, some physicians have reported prescription errors that resulted from pressing the wrong computer key when filling out drug and dosage information (Martin, Wall Street Journal, 4/20).
Above article publish on http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/eprescribing-expected-rise-wake-dea-rule-cms-incentives/
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Accurate, Affordable Medical Transcription for Group Practices
By Rajeev Rajagopal
The healthcare industry is booming like never before. The substantial growth rate has triggered a massive response from BPO companies that offer accurate, affordable medical transcription for group practices. Hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers strive to find the best transcription service providers in order to get quality service.
Physicians in group practices can’t often find time to manage the great inflow of patients and in addition to this, tight schedules and meetings hardly allow them any time off from work. Failure to manage their medical records properly would make patients lose faith in a medical practice and jeopardize its reputation. To employ staff for undertaking the work would not be practical owing to the huge expenses involved in terms of salary, employee benefits and other factors.
The practical approach to the problem lies in seeking the services of a reputable medical transcription company which would efficiently meet all the requirements regardless of the quantity of work the practice has. Most of the work is outsourced and therefore the cost of service tends to be considerably less. The practice could save as much as about 40%. In the long run, this would prove to be a great financial gain.
To provide accurate, affordable medical transcription for group practices outsourcing companies utilize the latest technology and software and complete the jobs entrusted within minimal turnabout time. Multilevel quality checks by quality analysts and verification of work by proofreaders ensure that transcription work is flawless.
HIPAA compliant companies take adequate safety and security measures. Encryption of data and transfer of files via FTP ensure dedicated and seamless connectivity. Last but not the least, round the clock customer/technical support addresses every issue to ensure customer satisfaction.
Above article publish on http://www.medicaltranscriptionoutsource.com/accurate-affordable-medical-transcription-group-practices/
The healthcare industry is booming like never before. The substantial growth rate has triggered a massive response from BPO companies that offer accurate, affordable medical transcription for group practices. Hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers strive to find the best transcription service providers in order to get quality service.
Physicians in group practices can’t often find time to manage the great inflow of patients and in addition to this, tight schedules and meetings hardly allow them any time off from work. Failure to manage their medical records properly would make patients lose faith in a medical practice and jeopardize its reputation. To employ staff for undertaking the work would not be practical owing to the huge expenses involved in terms of salary, employee benefits and other factors.
The practical approach to the problem lies in seeking the services of a reputable medical transcription company which would efficiently meet all the requirements regardless of the quantity of work the practice has. Most of the work is outsourced and therefore the cost of service tends to be considerably less. The practice could save as much as about 40%. In the long run, this would prove to be a great financial gain.
To provide accurate, affordable medical transcription for group practices outsourcing companies utilize the latest technology and software and complete the jobs entrusted within minimal turnabout time. Multilevel quality checks by quality analysts and verification of work by proofreaders ensure that transcription work is flawless.
HIPAA compliant companies take adequate safety and security measures. Encryption of data and transfer of files via FTP ensure dedicated and seamless connectivity. Last but not the least, round the clock customer/technical support addresses every issue to ensure customer satisfaction.
Above article publish on http://www.medicaltranscriptionoutsource.com/accurate-affordable-medical-transcription-group-practices/
Proposed EHR Certification Program Won’t Inhibit Innovation, Says Blumenthal
By Andrea Kraynak
Is your EHR meaningful use-compliant? Healthcare providers may soon be able to find out for sure.
HHS released a proposed rule Tuesday for establishing certification programs for health information technology. The proposed rule describes the creation of a certification program for EHRs, as mandated by the HITECH Act.
EHR certification is designed to “give purchasers and users of EHR technology assurances that the technology and products have the necessary functionality and security to help meet meaningful use criteria,” according to a press release from the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology.
When writing the interim final rule on standards and certification criteria for EHRs, the ONC strived to balance competing agendas, David Blumenthal, MD, MPP, the national coordinator for health information technology, said today at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2010 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Atlanta.
For example, it tries to balance the need for uniform standards against the need for interoperability and innovation and the need for an efficient way to exchange information versus patients’ rights to privacy. The agency tried to allow for flexibility, to meet providers “where they are,” and not inhibit “critical innovation,” he said.
Similar to the multi-stage approach proposed for the EHR meaningful use incentive program, the proposed establishment of an EHR certification process would also occur in various phases.
* The first phase would be a temporary certification process whereby the National Coordinator would approve organizations to test and certify EHRs.
* The eventual permanent program would transfer testing and certification fully to private sector organizations and separate the two functions.
The separation of those two functions is an important aspect, Blumenthal said. It allows certification of not only completed EHRs, but also of individual modules, a move designed to allow architectural innovation.
The proposed permanent program also has requirements for accreditation and addresses the potential certification of health information technology (HIT) other than complete EHRs and EHR modules.
HHS anticipates issuing separate final rules for each of the two programs.
The multi-phase system is designed to enable eligible professionals and hospitals to implement certified EHRs in time to qualify for the initial set of meaningful use incentives, which are set to begin as early as October for hospitals, and January 1, 2011 for eligible professionals.
The phased method is a sound way for HHS to work within the regulatory timelines put in place by the HITECH Act, says Frank Ruelas, director of compliance and risk management at Maryvale Hospital and principal of HIPAA Boot Camp in Casa Grande, AZ. “It’s an ambitious program, so this approach works well.”
Because HHS made such a conscious effort to solicit input from so many different parties and such a wide variety of stakeholders, it injected an element of practicality into the rule, according to Ruelas. In addition, the rule takes care to consider the evolving meaningful use criteria and how the adoption of future criteria may affect the certification status of EHR systems or modules, he says.
One element of the program the healthcare community is likely to find particularly helpful is the proposed master “certified HIT products list” that the ONC plans to have publicly available on its Web site.
“This ONC master list will help folks accurately identify genuinely certified products that may help meet their needs, such as in achieving meaningful use,” says Ruelas.
The ONC expects it will add additional features to the Web site over time, such as interactive functions that would allow providers to review combinations of certified EHR modules to verify that they would comprise a certified EHR technology.
Interested parties will have 30 days after the proposed rule’s publication in the Federal Register to comment on the proposed temporary program, and 60 days to comment on the proposed permanent program. You can submit comments electronically at www.regulations.gov.
Blumenthal made it clear that HIT leaders must step forward to provide feedback for the proposed rules; throughout the document, there are questions directed at HIT leaders and requests for feedback. “We want you to continue to be leaders and we will follow your lead,” he said.
With the release of the proposed rule, the focus now shifts from policy to the process of implementation, said Blumenthal, who expects the release of the three related EHR meaningful use final rules later this spring. His soon-to-be expanded office will now begin working on the next iteration of meaningful use.
“That is a huge job. We are going to have to grow considerably to make that happen,” he said.
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/proposed-ehr-certification-program-wont-inhibit-innovation-says-blumenthal/
Is your EHR meaningful use-compliant? Healthcare providers may soon be able to find out for sure.
HHS released a proposed rule Tuesday for establishing certification programs for health information technology. The proposed rule describes the creation of a certification program for EHRs, as mandated by the HITECH Act.
EHR certification is designed to “give purchasers and users of EHR technology assurances that the technology and products have the necessary functionality and security to help meet meaningful use criteria,” according to a press release from the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology.
When writing the interim final rule on standards and certification criteria for EHRs, the ONC strived to balance competing agendas, David Blumenthal, MD, MPP, the national coordinator for health information technology, said today at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2010 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Atlanta.
For example, it tries to balance the need for uniform standards against the need for interoperability and innovation and the need for an efficient way to exchange information versus patients’ rights to privacy. The agency tried to allow for flexibility, to meet providers “where they are,” and not inhibit “critical innovation,” he said.
Similar to the multi-stage approach proposed for the EHR meaningful use incentive program, the proposed establishment of an EHR certification process would also occur in various phases.
* The first phase would be a temporary certification process whereby the National Coordinator would approve organizations to test and certify EHRs.
* The eventual permanent program would transfer testing and certification fully to private sector organizations and separate the two functions.
The separation of those two functions is an important aspect, Blumenthal said. It allows certification of not only completed EHRs, but also of individual modules, a move designed to allow architectural innovation.
The proposed permanent program also has requirements for accreditation and addresses the potential certification of health information technology (HIT) other than complete EHRs and EHR modules.
HHS anticipates issuing separate final rules for each of the two programs.
The multi-phase system is designed to enable eligible professionals and hospitals to implement certified EHRs in time to qualify for the initial set of meaningful use incentives, which are set to begin as early as October for hospitals, and January 1, 2011 for eligible professionals.
The phased method is a sound way for HHS to work within the regulatory timelines put in place by the HITECH Act, says Frank Ruelas, director of compliance and risk management at Maryvale Hospital and principal of HIPAA Boot Camp in Casa Grande, AZ. “It’s an ambitious program, so this approach works well.”
Because HHS made such a conscious effort to solicit input from so many different parties and such a wide variety of stakeholders, it injected an element of practicality into the rule, according to Ruelas. In addition, the rule takes care to consider the evolving meaningful use criteria and how the adoption of future criteria may affect the certification status of EHR systems or modules, he says.
One element of the program the healthcare community is likely to find particularly helpful is the proposed master “certified HIT products list” that the ONC plans to have publicly available on its Web site.
“This ONC master list will help folks accurately identify genuinely certified products that may help meet their needs, such as in achieving meaningful use,” says Ruelas.
The ONC expects it will add additional features to the Web site over time, such as interactive functions that would allow providers to review combinations of certified EHR modules to verify that they would comprise a certified EHR technology.
Interested parties will have 30 days after the proposed rule’s publication in the Federal Register to comment on the proposed temporary program, and 60 days to comment on the proposed permanent program. You can submit comments electronically at www.regulations.gov.
Blumenthal made it clear that HIT leaders must step forward to provide feedback for the proposed rules; throughout the document, there are questions directed at HIT leaders and requests for feedback. “We want you to continue to be leaders and we will follow your lead,” he said.
With the release of the proposed rule, the focus now shifts from policy to the process of implementation, said Blumenthal, who expects the release of the three related EHR meaningful use final rules later this spring. His soon-to-be expanded office will now begin working on the next iteration of meaningful use.
“That is a huge job. We are going to have to grow considerably to make that happen,” he said.
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/proposed-ehr-certification-program-wont-inhibit-innovation-says-blumenthal/
Medical Billing – Electronic Or Paper Claims
By: Michael Russell
Sometimes there are things in life that are very obvious. In the medical billing world, this isn’t always the case. Many on the outside would automatically think that electronic billing of claims is the sure pick over sending paper claims via the United States Post Office. And while electronic billing certainly does have its advantages, is it really the be all and end all of medical billing? In this article, we’re going to take a good look at each method of sending claims. Sometimes the grass is greener but sometimes it isn’t.
Let’s take a look at the facts of each type of billing. With paper claims, you have to either manually fill out the claims by hand, especially if you’re a small office and can’t afford expensive software, or at best you need the software to fill out the claims as they are printed off your dot matrix or laser printer. Most software products for this industry don’t support Inkjet printing. For that matter, most carriers won’t accept anything but laser quality anyway.
With paper claims, you also have the wait. Because insurance carriers are desperately trying to move on over to electronic billing, they process paper claims at a snails pace. It could be anywhere from 30 to 60 days to get paid on your paper claim. This is not a maybe. This is indeed a fact. Paper claims get paid slower.
Another fact of paper claims is that they carry the additional cost of having to keep forms in inventory. These forms are not cheap. Even if you get them included in your software package, the cost of billing a paper claim, at least on a per claim basis, is much higher than electronic transmissions.
Another fact of paper claims is that they have to be mailed. This adds the cost of postage to the already high cost of paper claim billing. Plus, with paper claim billing, there is always the chance that a claim can be lost in the mail. While this is not necessarily a given that it will happen, it is a definite possibility.
Now, let’s look at the facts of electronic billing. For starters, electronic medical billing is faster. The claims are literally transmitted to the insurance carrier in a matter of seconds, depending on how big the claim file is. Larger files do take longer, but for the most part, this is a much quicker process.
Electronically billed claims get paid faster. There is no question about this. Insurance carriers do this as an incentive for medical billing agencies to use electronic billing methods.
Electronic billing requires software and transmission hardware such as a modem or an Internet connection. This adds an expense to electronic billing that you don’t have with paper claims. This is a fact. There is no way to send claims electronically without some kind of software and transmission device.
Those are the facts of each. On the surface, it appears that electronic billing is the hands down choice. But before you make that decision, you must realize that unless you have a large enough client base to justify electronic billing, the cost of the software alone might make it unprofitable. Plus, with electronic billing, you’re going to have technical issues that you won’t have with paper claims, meaning you’re going to have to hire a networking staff and other technical persons.
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/medical-billing-electronic-paper-claims/
Sometimes there are things in life that are very obvious. In the medical billing world, this isn’t always the case. Many on the outside would automatically think that electronic billing of claims is the sure pick over sending paper claims via the United States Post Office. And while electronic billing certainly does have its advantages, is it really the be all and end all of medical billing? In this article, we’re going to take a good look at each method of sending claims. Sometimes the grass is greener but sometimes it isn’t.
Let’s take a look at the facts of each type of billing. With paper claims, you have to either manually fill out the claims by hand, especially if you’re a small office and can’t afford expensive software, or at best you need the software to fill out the claims as they are printed off your dot matrix or laser printer. Most software products for this industry don’t support Inkjet printing. For that matter, most carriers won’t accept anything but laser quality anyway.
With paper claims, you also have the wait. Because insurance carriers are desperately trying to move on over to electronic billing, they process paper claims at a snails pace. It could be anywhere from 30 to 60 days to get paid on your paper claim. This is not a maybe. This is indeed a fact. Paper claims get paid slower.
Another fact of paper claims is that they carry the additional cost of having to keep forms in inventory. These forms are not cheap. Even if you get them included in your software package, the cost of billing a paper claim, at least on a per claim basis, is much higher than electronic transmissions.
Another fact of paper claims is that they have to be mailed. This adds the cost of postage to the already high cost of paper claim billing. Plus, with paper claim billing, there is always the chance that a claim can be lost in the mail. While this is not necessarily a given that it will happen, it is a definite possibility.
Now, let’s look at the facts of electronic billing. For starters, electronic medical billing is faster. The claims are literally transmitted to the insurance carrier in a matter of seconds, depending on how big the claim file is. Larger files do take longer, but for the most part, this is a much quicker process.
Electronically billed claims get paid faster. There is no question about this. Insurance carriers do this as an incentive for medical billing agencies to use electronic billing methods.
Electronic billing requires software and transmission hardware such as a modem or an Internet connection. This adds an expense to electronic billing that you don’t have with paper claims. This is a fact. There is no way to send claims electronically without some kind of software and transmission device.
Those are the facts of each. On the surface, it appears that electronic billing is the hands down choice. But before you make that decision, you must realize that unless you have a large enough client base to justify electronic billing, the cost of the software alone might make it unprofitable. Plus, with electronic billing, you’re going to have technical issues that you won’t have with paper claims, meaning you’re going to have to hire a networking staff and other technical persons.
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/medical-billing-electronic-paper-claims/
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Relaxing Meaningful Use Key to EMR Industry Growth, Kalorama Notes
By Chip Means
Relaxing the meaningful use standards, as some physician organizations and members of Congress are urging HHS to do, would be a boon to the EMR industry, according to market research firm Kalorama Information, which completed its market research report “EMR 2010 (Market Analysis, ARRA Incentives, Key Players, and Important Trends)” earlier this year. The report predicts a $13.8 billion market that if properly driven by incentives and encouragement of health systems, could grow in double digits.
“Requiring physicians to undergo 25 mandates by next year may not be effective given the kind of real-world usage among physicians we see today,” said Bruce Carlson, publisher of Kalorama Information. “Getting physicians used to these systems is the challenge to a totally paperless healthcare system in the United States and we think gradual, achievable goals would be preferable.”
Kalorama notes that the objectives of the HSS meaningful use requirements, in order for physicians to receive incentives in 2011, include some that would be expected, such as a requirement that physicians must submit a percentage of claims electronically, use an established diagnostic list such as ICD-9, and have common medications entered for each patient. The firm notes that some sort of requirement for computerized physician order entry (CPOE) on a percentage of orders should also be expected to increase EMR use. But Kalorama believes that requiring 80% of orders via CPOE by 2011, or that half of patients get auto-reminders through an EMR system, is a possible limiter to sales of EMR systems.
Thirty-seven U.S. Senators, led by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, wrote a letter requesting improvements in a proposed rule for distributing stimulus funds for health IT that was published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services which would increase flexibility and encourage participation among providers. 235 members of the U.S. House of Representatives urged CMS to modify its proposed definition and requirements for hospitals to qualify for the meaningful use of health IT incentive payments.
Kalorama’s market research study was conducted before the release of ‘meaningful use’ standards by HHS, but it did note that the largest barrier to EMR use in the United States is physician compliance. Kalorama has also noted that for EMR to grow in the way the federal government envisions, healthcare systems will have to develop incentives of their own, something that might be in jeopardy if standards are not easier to follow.
“It’s not just about encouraging physicians directly, though that’s part of it,” notes Carlson. “It’s about encouraging healthcare systems to develop ‘matching’ programs to encourage EMR among their affiliated physicians. Unless there’s a clear road to incentive money they won’t do that.”
Above article publish on http://www.emrspecialists.com/2010/04/relaxing-meaningful-key-emr-industry-growth-kalorama-notes/
Relaxing the meaningful use standards, as some physician organizations and members of Congress are urging HHS to do, would be a boon to the EMR industry, according to market research firm Kalorama Information, which completed its market research report “EMR 2010 (Market Analysis, ARRA Incentives, Key Players, and Important Trends)” earlier this year. The report predicts a $13.8 billion market that if properly driven by incentives and encouragement of health systems, could grow in double digits.
“Requiring physicians to undergo 25 mandates by next year may not be effective given the kind of real-world usage among physicians we see today,” said Bruce Carlson, publisher of Kalorama Information. “Getting physicians used to these systems is the challenge to a totally paperless healthcare system in the United States and we think gradual, achievable goals would be preferable.”
Kalorama notes that the objectives of the HSS meaningful use requirements, in order for physicians to receive incentives in 2011, include some that would be expected, such as a requirement that physicians must submit a percentage of claims electronically, use an established diagnostic list such as ICD-9, and have common medications entered for each patient. The firm notes that some sort of requirement for computerized physician order entry (CPOE) on a percentage of orders should also be expected to increase EMR use. But Kalorama believes that requiring 80% of orders via CPOE by 2011, or that half of patients get auto-reminders through an EMR system, is a possible limiter to sales of EMR systems.
Thirty-seven U.S. Senators, led by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, wrote a letter requesting improvements in a proposed rule for distributing stimulus funds for health IT that was published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services which would increase flexibility and encourage participation among providers. 235 members of the U.S. House of Representatives urged CMS to modify its proposed definition and requirements for hospitals to qualify for the meaningful use of health IT incentive payments.
Kalorama’s market research study was conducted before the release of ‘meaningful use’ standards by HHS, but it did note that the largest barrier to EMR use in the United States is physician compliance. Kalorama has also noted that for EMR to grow in the way the federal government envisions, healthcare systems will have to develop incentives of their own, something that might be in jeopardy if standards are not easier to follow.
“It’s not just about encouraging physicians directly, though that’s part of it,” notes Carlson. “It’s about encouraging healthcare systems to develop ‘matching’ programs to encourage EMR among their affiliated physicians. Unless there’s a clear road to incentive money they won’t do that.”
Above article publish on http://www.emrspecialists.com/2010/04/relaxing-meaningful-key-emr-industry-growth-kalorama-notes/
More Doctors Are Prescribing Medicines Online
By Timothy W. Martin
Doctors are increasingly prescribing medications electronically, abandoning the traditional paper scripts that can result in drug errors due to hard-to-read writing or coverage denials by a patient’s insurer.
The number of e-prescriptions nearly tripled last year to 191 million from the previous year’s 68 million, representing about 12% of the 1.63 billion original prescriptions, excluding refills, according to Surescripts LLC, whose online network handles the bulk of the electronic communications. The growth has accelerated. For the first three months of this year, nearly one in five prescriptions was filed electronically, Surescripts says. About 25% of all office-based doctors currently have the technology to e-prescribe, more than twice as many as at the end of 2008, Surescripts says.
Industry officials expect the growth in e-prescribing to continue, helped in part by a regulatory ruling last month that will soon allow doctors to start prescribing controlled medications such as narcotics and anti-depressants electronically. Under Drug Enforcement Administration rules, doctors previously had to hand out paper prescriptions for controlled drugs, even while other drugs could be e-prescribed.
The recent DEA ruling “is what we’ve all been waiting for,” says John Halamka, an emergency-room physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who has used e-prescribing for three years. Being able to digitally zap some prescriptions to a pharmacy, while having to use a pad and paper for other medicines has disrupted work flow at the hospital, he says. “Now we can write prescriptions for [cholesterol drug] Lipitor and Valium [a controlled anti-anxiety medication] on the same program,” he says.
Doctors transmit e-prescriptions via a secured Internet network directly to pharmacies from their computers or hand-held devices. Nearly all chain drug stores and 62% of independent pharmacies now accept e-prescriptions that are uploaded directly to their computers. For medical practices, the cost of e-prescribing software and hardware, such as laptops, as well as training can range from about $1,000 to $1,750 per physician, according to software makers.
Displayed on the doctor’s e-prescribing screen are an array of drugs and their prices. Doctors select among different doses and either generic or name-brand medications. Also listed are which medications are covered, and which are not, by a patient’s insurance company. For some e-prescribing programs, symbols in the form of small faces appear on the screen: A green smiley face means the medication will be the cheapest for a patient, or that it’s the preferred drug based on other medications the patient is taking. Yellow and red faces indicate less desirable options.
Major pharmaceutical chains say about one in four prescriptions they receive aren’t filled because they are not covered under a patient’s insurance plan. That usually prompts calls from the pharmacy to the doctor seeking alternative medication, they say. Insurance information is also available without e-prescribing, but usually requires a doctor or his staff poring through binders of information.
Ali Tural, a pediatrician from Fall River, Mass., who started e-prescribing last fall, says the new system has meant he spends less time on the phone with pharmacists and patients wrangling, for instance, over prescriptions not covered by insurance or the cost of the medications. “In the past, patients would complain to me about the little eye drops that cost them $80 or $100,” Dr. Tural says. “Now I can go to a patient and show them the real-life prices and compare the costs.”
A study by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, published in February in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that e-prescribing significantly reduced errors that occurred with paper prescriptions, including patients receiving medications of the wrong dose or incorrect usage instructions. The researchers examined some 7,500 prescriptions from 12 medical practices. Practices that used electronic prescribing for a year cut their error rate to 6.6% on average from 42.5% before they began e-prescribing, the researchers found. The error rate at medical practices that continued to use paper prescriptions rose slightly to 38% on average from 37%.
Electronic prescriptions can also lead to errors, for instance if a doctor hits the wrong computer key. Dr. Tural says that in e-prescribing for his young patients he has inadvertently selected the pill version of a drug instead of the liquid form.
Michael Cohen, president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit that analyzes medication errors, supports e-prescribing. Still, he recommends that patients getting electronic prescriptions also ask for verbal instructions from the doctor for taking the medication and request a printout of the e-prescription.
Debbie Kenney, 59, of Philadelphia, says her doctor last spring wrote her a prescription for a hypertension medication that had recently come on the market. Unknown to both of them, however, the new medication could interfere with her asthma. Side effects flared up in December when she had trouble breathing after catching a cold, she says.
After her doctor began e-prescribing in January, Ms. Kenney says the new system clearly indicated that she shouldn’t be taking that hypertension drug. Instead, she says, her doctor switched her to another medication for hypertension that was compatible with her asthma.
“I do feel more confident now,” Ms. Kenney says. “When other drugs are prescribed, I can say to my doctor, ‘Show me the side effects.’ “
Helping to win doctors over to e-prescribing are incentives by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees the big federal insurance programs. CMS last year began paying doctors a bonus for e-prescribing. And beginning in 2012, CMS will begin penalizing doctors who haven’t adopted the electronic system for issuing prescriptions.
E-prescribing also is expected to encourage broader use of electronic medical records, which includes such features as storage of full medical histories, lab reports and programs that let doctors send alerts and reminders to patients. The cost of the technology to maintain full electronic medical records is roughly $25,000 to $45,000 per physician. An e-prescribing system typically can later be incorporated into a medical records system.
President Barack Obama has touted broader adoption of e-prescriptions and electronic medical records as integral parts of health-care reform. Government stimulus money has been earmarked for helping doctors pay for electronic medical records systems.
Pharmacy chains, including Walgreen Co. and CVS Caremark Corp., say they like e-prescribing because it means their staff spend less time on the phone sorting out problems with doctors. “E-prescribing gives the pharmacist more time to spend with the patient, to really have those meaningful discussions,” says Don Huonker, Walgreen senior vice president of health care innovation.
Above Article Publish on http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/doctors-prescribing-medicines-online/
Doctors are increasingly prescribing medications electronically, abandoning the traditional paper scripts that can result in drug errors due to hard-to-read writing or coverage denials by a patient’s insurer.
The number of e-prescriptions nearly tripled last year to 191 million from the previous year’s 68 million, representing about 12% of the 1.63 billion original prescriptions, excluding refills, according to Surescripts LLC, whose online network handles the bulk of the electronic communications. The growth has accelerated. For the first three months of this year, nearly one in five prescriptions was filed electronically, Surescripts says. About 25% of all office-based doctors currently have the technology to e-prescribe, more than twice as many as at the end of 2008, Surescripts says.
Industry officials expect the growth in e-prescribing to continue, helped in part by a regulatory ruling last month that will soon allow doctors to start prescribing controlled medications such as narcotics and anti-depressants electronically. Under Drug Enforcement Administration rules, doctors previously had to hand out paper prescriptions for controlled drugs, even while other drugs could be e-prescribed.
The recent DEA ruling “is what we’ve all been waiting for,” says John Halamka, an emergency-room physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who has used e-prescribing for three years. Being able to digitally zap some prescriptions to a pharmacy, while having to use a pad and paper for other medicines has disrupted work flow at the hospital, he says. “Now we can write prescriptions for [cholesterol drug] Lipitor and Valium [a controlled anti-anxiety medication] on the same program,” he says.
Doctors transmit e-prescriptions via a secured Internet network directly to pharmacies from their computers or hand-held devices. Nearly all chain drug stores and 62% of independent pharmacies now accept e-prescriptions that are uploaded directly to their computers. For medical practices, the cost of e-prescribing software and hardware, such as laptops, as well as training can range from about $1,000 to $1,750 per physician, according to software makers.
Displayed on the doctor’s e-prescribing screen are an array of drugs and their prices. Doctors select among different doses and either generic or name-brand medications. Also listed are which medications are covered, and which are not, by a patient’s insurance company. For some e-prescribing programs, symbols in the form of small faces appear on the screen: A green smiley face means the medication will be the cheapest for a patient, or that it’s the preferred drug based on other medications the patient is taking. Yellow and red faces indicate less desirable options.
Major pharmaceutical chains say about one in four prescriptions they receive aren’t filled because they are not covered under a patient’s insurance plan. That usually prompts calls from the pharmacy to the doctor seeking alternative medication, they say. Insurance information is also available without e-prescribing, but usually requires a doctor or his staff poring through binders of information.
Ali Tural, a pediatrician from Fall River, Mass., who started e-prescribing last fall, says the new system has meant he spends less time on the phone with pharmacists and patients wrangling, for instance, over prescriptions not covered by insurance or the cost of the medications. “In the past, patients would complain to me about the little eye drops that cost them $80 or $100,” Dr. Tural says. “Now I can go to a patient and show them the real-life prices and compare the costs.”
A study by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, published in February in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that e-prescribing significantly reduced errors that occurred with paper prescriptions, including patients receiving medications of the wrong dose or incorrect usage instructions. The researchers examined some 7,500 prescriptions from 12 medical practices. Practices that used electronic prescribing for a year cut their error rate to 6.6% on average from 42.5% before they began e-prescribing, the researchers found. The error rate at medical practices that continued to use paper prescriptions rose slightly to 38% on average from 37%.
Electronic prescriptions can also lead to errors, for instance if a doctor hits the wrong computer key. Dr. Tural says that in e-prescribing for his young patients he has inadvertently selected the pill version of a drug instead of the liquid form.
Michael Cohen, president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit that analyzes medication errors, supports e-prescribing. Still, he recommends that patients getting electronic prescriptions also ask for verbal instructions from the doctor for taking the medication and request a printout of the e-prescription.
Debbie Kenney, 59, of Philadelphia, says her doctor last spring wrote her a prescription for a hypertension medication that had recently come on the market. Unknown to both of them, however, the new medication could interfere with her asthma. Side effects flared up in December when she had trouble breathing after catching a cold, she says.
After her doctor began e-prescribing in January, Ms. Kenney says the new system clearly indicated that she shouldn’t be taking that hypertension drug. Instead, she says, her doctor switched her to another medication for hypertension that was compatible with her asthma.
“I do feel more confident now,” Ms. Kenney says. “When other drugs are prescribed, I can say to my doctor, ‘Show me the side effects.’ “
Helping to win doctors over to e-prescribing are incentives by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees the big federal insurance programs. CMS last year began paying doctors a bonus for e-prescribing. And beginning in 2012, CMS will begin penalizing doctors who haven’t adopted the electronic system for issuing prescriptions.
E-prescribing also is expected to encourage broader use of electronic medical records, which includes such features as storage of full medical histories, lab reports and programs that let doctors send alerts and reminders to patients. The cost of the technology to maintain full electronic medical records is roughly $25,000 to $45,000 per physician. An e-prescribing system typically can later be incorporated into a medical records system.
President Barack Obama has touted broader adoption of e-prescriptions and electronic medical records as integral parts of health-care reform. Government stimulus money has been earmarked for helping doctors pay for electronic medical records systems.
Pharmacy chains, including Walgreen Co. and CVS Caremark Corp., say they like e-prescribing because it means their staff spend less time on the phone sorting out problems with doctors. “E-prescribing gives the pharmacist more time to spend with the patient, to really have those meaningful discussions,” says Don Huonker, Walgreen senior vice president of health care innovation.
Above Article Publish on http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/doctors-prescribing-medicines-online/
Bill Would Expand Eligibility for ‘Meaningful Use’ Incentives
Yesterday, Reps. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) and Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) introduced a bill (HR 5025) that would allow behavioral, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers to qualify for incentive payments for the “meaningful use” of electronic health records, Healthcare IT News reports.
Under the 2009 federal economic stimulus package, hospitals and physicians who demonstrate meaningful use of EHRs can qualify for incentive payments through Medicaid and Medicare.
The new Health Information Technology Extension for Behavioral Health Services Act of 2010 would extend eligibility for the incentive payments to:
* Behavioral and mental health professionals and clinics;
* Substance abuse professionals and treatment facilities;
* Psychiatric hospitals; and
* Licensed psychologists and clinical social workers (Merrill, Healthcare IT News, 4/16).
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/bill-expand-eligibility-meaningful-use-incentives/
Under the 2009 federal economic stimulus package, hospitals and physicians who demonstrate meaningful use of EHRs can qualify for incentive payments through Medicaid and Medicare.
The new Health Information Technology Extension for Behavioral Health Services Act of 2010 would extend eligibility for the incentive payments to:
* Behavioral and mental health professionals and clinics;
* Substance abuse professionals and treatment facilities;
* Psychiatric hospitals; and
* Licensed psychologists and clinical social workers (Merrill, Healthcare IT News, 4/16).
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/bill-expand-eligibility-meaningful-use-incentives/
Monday, April 19, 2010
A New Study: Easing the Adoption and Use of Electronic Health Records in Small Practices
A new study identifies lessons learned by organizations that help small physician practices adopt and use electronic health records (EHRs).
The authors surveyed 29 initiatives that help smaller medical practices adopt and use EHR technology, including some regional extension centers. They obtained information from program leaders, Web sites, and published reports.
Key Findings
* Current programs providing health IT assistance form one-on-one relationships with practice clinicians and staff to overcome implementation barriers—such as lack of technical expertise, isolation, and practice disruption—and to increase odds of successful practice transformation.
* Practice consultants need direct experience with small practices, the technical expertise to manage relationships with vendors, knowledge of software implementation, and know-how around work-flow change and quality improvement methods. Program leaders warned of a shortage of such individuals and remain concerned about finding sufficient qualified staff.
* A significant barrier to successful implementation and use of health IT is underestimating the effort and upheaval that accompany implementation.
* Most assistance programs can provide only limited help with selecting software and hardware, yet this is a critical decision for practices.
* Practice redesign and quality improvement methods are integral to using health IT to its full capabilities. Program leaders stressed addressing practice redesign prior to, or simultaneously with, health IT implementation.
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/a-new-study-easing-the-adoption-and-use-of-electronic-health-records-in-small-practices/
The authors surveyed 29 initiatives that help smaller medical practices adopt and use EHR technology, including some regional extension centers. They obtained information from program leaders, Web sites, and published reports.
Key Findings
* Current programs providing health IT assistance form one-on-one relationships with practice clinicians and staff to overcome implementation barriers—such as lack of technical expertise, isolation, and practice disruption—and to increase odds of successful practice transformation.
* Practice consultants need direct experience with small practices, the technical expertise to manage relationships with vendors, knowledge of software implementation, and know-how around work-flow change and quality improvement methods. Program leaders warned of a shortage of such individuals and remain concerned about finding sufficient qualified staff.
* A significant barrier to successful implementation and use of health IT is underestimating the effort and upheaval that accompany implementation.
* Most assistance programs can provide only limited help with selecting software and hardware, yet this is a critical decision for practices.
* Practice redesign and quality improvement methods are integral to using health IT to its full capabilities. Program leaders stressed addressing practice redesign prior to, or simultaneously with, health IT implementation.
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/a-new-study-easing-the-adoption-and-use-of-electronic-health-records-in-small-practices/
EHR Early Adopter Offers Advice for Providers Vetting New Technologies
By Andrea Kraynak,
Upcoming EHR meaningful use subsidies may give many hospitals the additional incentive necessary to push toward a largely paperless existence.
Some facilities may be adopting their first electronic systems at this time. Others currently operating in a hybrid environment are likely looking to increase their EHR technologies to meet soon-to-be-finalized meaningful use measures.
Of course, cost is always a part of the conversation when vetting potential new technologies. Many providers may also want to insist on purchasing certified EHR technologies so they are eligible for incentives. But many other less obvious points warrant consideration when selecting potential EHR technologies, says Deborah S. Fernandez, RHIA, corporate services manager for New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, who has been working with various EHR systems and technologies since the late 1990s.
First of all, as much as possible, HIM should be a part of the team that considers various EHR technologies. HIM staff can offer a unique perspective on what the new technology needs to be able to accomplish. For example, HIM staff members may be able to determine whether the potential technology will capture documentation in a way that meets legal requirements.
“It’s terrible to make an investment like that and not have a full handle on everything [the system needs to do],” Fernandez says.
And don’t forget about your record reproduction needs. Consider the various healthcare reform initiatives aimed at saving government dollars. It all translates into more audits for hospitals, says Fernandez. And that means reproducing your records for auditors.
“My facility is going to be receiving recovery audit contractor requests,” she says. “That’s a lot of printing.”
For example, consider how systems print hard copies of your data. Some systems print information in the form of unwieldy spreadsheets instead of more consolidated narratives.
“Some systems are very nice and neat, but some of them are horrific,” Fernandez says. “Some of these systems will print thousands of pages.”
In addition to printing hard copies, don’t forget to look at the ease with which potential systems can reproduce electronic copies of information, Fernandez says. Many auditors may soon begin to accept electronic versions of medical records, if they don’t already.
But the electronic versions can be equally unwieldy; some systems produce huge files, she says. When considering various technologies, consider how easy it will be to save the data in the systems on a CD or DVD, for example.
And be sure to talk to vendors about how their technologies will interface with those you already have in place. Many providers will adopt different specialized systems for different areas of the hospital. This isn’t necessarily bad, Fernandez says, because the technologies are designed to do different things. But at the same time, you don’t want staff members to have to sign on to five separate systems to view information on a patient.
You’ll probably need to push systems into working together for information to be available in this way, she says. Do yourself a favor and consider upfront whether technologies will be able to talk to each other.
“The idea that clinicians can view something in a single system might not sound like such a big deal, but it is,” Fernandez says. “You want it to seem to the end user that you have only one system instead of a dozen.”
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/ehr-early-adopter-offers-advice-for-providers-vetting-new-technologies/
Upcoming EHR meaningful use subsidies may give many hospitals the additional incentive necessary to push toward a largely paperless existence.
Some facilities may be adopting their first electronic systems at this time. Others currently operating in a hybrid environment are likely looking to increase their EHR technologies to meet soon-to-be-finalized meaningful use measures.
Of course, cost is always a part of the conversation when vetting potential new technologies. Many providers may also want to insist on purchasing certified EHR technologies so they are eligible for incentives. But many other less obvious points warrant consideration when selecting potential EHR technologies, says Deborah S. Fernandez, RHIA, corporate services manager for New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, who has been working with various EHR systems and technologies since the late 1990s.
First of all, as much as possible, HIM should be a part of the team that considers various EHR technologies. HIM staff can offer a unique perspective on what the new technology needs to be able to accomplish. For example, HIM staff members may be able to determine whether the potential technology will capture documentation in a way that meets legal requirements.
“It’s terrible to make an investment like that and not have a full handle on everything [the system needs to do],” Fernandez says.
And don’t forget about your record reproduction needs. Consider the various healthcare reform initiatives aimed at saving government dollars. It all translates into more audits for hospitals, says Fernandez. And that means reproducing your records for auditors.
“My facility is going to be receiving recovery audit contractor requests,” she says. “That’s a lot of printing.”
For example, consider how systems print hard copies of your data. Some systems print information in the form of unwieldy spreadsheets instead of more consolidated narratives.
“Some systems are very nice and neat, but some of them are horrific,” Fernandez says. “Some of these systems will print thousands of pages.”
In addition to printing hard copies, don’t forget to look at the ease with which potential systems can reproduce electronic copies of information, Fernandez says. Many auditors may soon begin to accept electronic versions of medical records, if they don’t already.
But the electronic versions can be equally unwieldy; some systems produce huge files, she says. When considering various technologies, consider how easy it will be to save the data in the systems on a CD or DVD, for example.
And be sure to talk to vendors about how their technologies will interface with those you already have in place. Many providers will adopt different specialized systems for different areas of the hospital. This isn’t necessarily bad, Fernandez says, because the technologies are designed to do different things. But at the same time, you don’t want staff members to have to sign on to five separate systems to view information on a patient.
You’ll probably need to push systems into working together for information to be available in this way, she says. Do yourself a favor and consider upfront whether technologies will be able to talk to each other.
“The idea that clinicians can view something in a single system might not sound like such a big deal, but it is,” Fernandez says. “You want it to seem to the end user that you have only one system instead of a dozen.”
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/ehr-early-adopter-offers-advice-for-providers-vetting-new-technologies/
Friday, April 16, 2010
MIPPA Provides Incentives for E-Prescribing
By Rich Silverman
American health care providers write close to 3 billion prescriptions per year, according to a number of estimates, with about 80% of them being written by hand. A recent study conducted by the Weill Cornell Medical School in New York found that about 4 of every 10 handwritten prescriptions had an error while the rate of errors found in electronic prescriptions is around one-seventh of that, or about 6%.
If those numbers hold true, then almost 1 billion prescriptions each year have an error in them. Small wonder, then, that the government has enacted legislation to encourage providers to switch to electronic prescribing.
Amid the sea of health technology acronyms like HIPAA, HITECH, HIT and EMR floats one we’ve not addressed so far – MIPPA, the Medicare Improvement for Patients and Providers Act of 2008 (we’re really not making this one up). The act contains provisions relating to a host of issues such as physician quality reporting, physician payments and – the one we’re addressing here – electronic prescribing.
Structured with incentives to encourage physicians to adopt electronic prescribing, MIPPA provides for payments of up to 2% of qualifying Medicare billings during 2010 by using a qualified e-prescribing or Electronic Health Record system that meets all of the following requirements:
* Generates a complete active medication list
* Selects medications, prints and electronically transmits prescriptions and conducts all alerts
* Recommends available alternatives that are less expensive and therapeutically appropriate
* Provides information on tiered formulary medications, eligibility and insurance authorization
* Meets specified software technical requirements
Incentives will continue at up to 2% through 2010, drop to 1% in 2011 and 2012, and .5% in 2013. Beginning as early as 2012, penalties for NOT using e-prescribing can and will be assessed by Medicare, rising to as high as a 2% reduction in payments.
As with all government programs, there is a host of fine print to wade through, and there are multiple ifs and ands to deal with, but the overall program does provide incentives to you to adopt electronic prescribing. To help you navigate all that verbiage, HHS has created a comprehensive FAQ section on its website.
If you expect to qualify for incentive payments offered by the government for the adoption of an EMR/EHR system, you will need to be engaged in e-prescribing, because e-prescribing will be an integral part of the definition of meaningful use. And grumble all you want about how that implementation of an e-Prescribing system may require work up front, but the benefits that will accrue to you down the line, such as reduced errors and far fewer phone calls using up your staff time to resolve prescribing problems, will more than make up for it.
http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/mippa-incentives-eprescribing/
American health care providers write close to 3 billion prescriptions per year, according to a number of estimates, with about 80% of them being written by hand. A recent study conducted by the Weill Cornell Medical School in New York found that about 4 of every 10 handwritten prescriptions had an error while the rate of errors found in electronic prescriptions is around one-seventh of that, or about 6%.
If those numbers hold true, then almost 1 billion prescriptions each year have an error in them. Small wonder, then, that the government has enacted legislation to encourage providers to switch to electronic prescribing.
Amid the sea of health technology acronyms like HIPAA, HITECH, HIT and EMR floats one we’ve not addressed so far – MIPPA, the Medicare Improvement for Patients and Providers Act of 2008 (we’re really not making this one up). The act contains provisions relating to a host of issues such as physician quality reporting, physician payments and – the one we’re addressing here – electronic prescribing.
Structured with incentives to encourage physicians to adopt electronic prescribing, MIPPA provides for payments of up to 2% of qualifying Medicare billings during 2010 by using a qualified e-prescribing or Electronic Health Record system that meets all of the following requirements:
* Generates a complete active medication list
* Selects medications, prints and electronically transmits prescriptions and conducts all alerts
* Recommends available alternatives that are less expensive and therapeutically appropriate
* Provides information on tiered formulary medications, eligibility and insurance authorization
* Meets specified software technical requirements
Incentives will continue at up to 2% through 2010, drop to 1% in 2011 and 2012, and .5% in 2013. Beginning as early as 2012, penalties for NOT using e-prescribing can and will be assessed by Medicare, rising to as high as a 2% reduction in payments.
As with all government programs, there is a host of fine print to wade through, and there are multiple ifs and ands to deal with, but the overall program does provide incentives to you to adopt electronic prescribing. To help you navigate all that verbiage, HHS has created a comprehensive FAQ section on its website.
If you expect to qualify for incentive payments offered by the government for the adoption of an EMR/EHR system, you will need to be engaged in e-prescribing, because e-prescribing will be an integral part of the definition of meaningful use. And grumble all you want about how that implementation of an e-Prescribing system may require work up front, but the benefits that will accrue to you down the line, such as reduced errors and far fewer phone calls using up your staff time to resolve prescribing problems, will more than make up for it.
http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/mippa-incentives-eprescribing/
Case Western Reserve to help providers adopt EHRs in Ohio
By Mike Miliard
CLEVELAND – Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine has received nearly $8 million in federal stimulus money from the Ohio Health Information Partnership (OHIP), the state designated entity for health information exchange development. That funding will position the school as a regional extension center (REC), allowing it to help 1,765 healthcare providers in Lorain, Cuyahoga, Lake, Geauga and Ashtabula counties advance the use of health IT in their practices.
The CWRU School of Medicine is one of seven RECs in Ohio established by OHIP and made possible by funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). An eighth REC was awarded directly by the federal government to HealthBridge, a not-for-profit health information exchange serving Greater Cincinnati and surrounding areas.
The federal and state initiative is providing smaller primary care practices with an incentive to early adoption of health information technology.
“Electronic health records tend to be financially out of reach for private practitioners and small practices,” said Julie Rehm, senior associate dean of the CWRU School of Medicine and associate vice president of strategic initiatives for CWRU. “If healthcare providers adopt early they are eligible for additional reimbursement from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services until 2011. After that, the reimbursement declines and penalties kick in starting in 2015.”
The REC endeavor, as directed by the federal government, is targeted towards primary care providers, specifically, physicians—MDs or DOs who are family physicians, general internal, pediatric or OB/GYN, and other primary care providers such as nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, or physician assistants with prescriptive privileges and practicing in one of the previously mentioned areas.
The CWRU School of Medicine will provide administration and management to multiple contractors whose roles will vary by expertise but overall will help providers select products and provide training on how to use the technology to its fullest potential in order to improve patient care. This includes providing workforce support, implementation and project management, practice and workflow design, vendor selection, privacy and security best practices, progress towards meaningful use, functional interoperability and health information exchange.
The CWRU REC has a number of stakeholders, including University Hospitals, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative. In addition, the entities likely to participate in the CWRU REC include Kaiser Permanente, Medical Mutual of Ohio and CareSource.
“The School of Medicine is committed to improving the health of our community,” said Pamela B. Davis, MD, dean of the School of Medicine and vice president for medical affairs, CWRU. “We believe that HIT is a key tool in healthcare reform and we look forward to partnering with independent healthcare providers to encourage quick adoption of HIT. Once enabled, HIT provides a two-fold benefit: 1) improving patient care, for example, through electronic alerts that notify healthcare providers of a patient’s need for annual testing e.g., mammograms, and 2) by lowering healthcare costs by reducing redundant testing.”
The Case Western Reserve REC is expected to begin work sometime this month.
“Success for the CWRU REC will be measured in three ways,” said Rehm. “First, we must meet the milestones and metrics that are being asked of us by the federal government. Second, we must enable the earliest adoption possible which will allow primary care providers to pull in the maximum amount of federal dollars from reimbursements. And third, we must improve the quality of care through the utilization of this technology which will ultimately improve the health of Clevelanders.”
http://www.myemrstimulus.com/case-western-reserve-providers-adopt-ehrs-ohio/
CLEVELAND – Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine has received nearly $8 million in federal stimulus money from the Ohio Health Information Partnership (OHIP), the state designated entity for health information exchange development. That funding will position the school as a regional extension center (REC), allowing it to help 1,765 healthcare providers in Lorain, Cuyahoga, Lake, Geauga and Ashtabula counties advance the use of health IT in their practices.
The CWRU School of Medicine is one of seven RECs in Ohio established by OHIP and made possible by funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). An eighth REC was awarded directly by the federal government to HealthBridge, a not-for-profit health information exchange serving Greater Cincinnati and surrounding areas.
The federal and state initiative is providing smaller primary care practices with an incentive to early adoption of health information technology.
“Electronic health records tend to be financially out of reach for private practitioners and small practices,” said Julie Rehm, senior associate dean of the CWRU School of Medicine and associate vice president of strategic initiatives for CWRU. “If healthcare providers adopt early they are eligible for additional reimbursement from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services until 2011. After that, the reimbursement declines and penalties kick in starting in 2015.”
The REC endeavor, as directed by the federal government, is targeted towards primary care providers, specifically, physicians—MDs or DOs who are family physicians, general internal, pediatric or OB/GYN, and other primary care providers such as nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, or physician assistants with prescriptive privileges and practicing in one of the previously mentioned areas.
The CWRU School of Medicine will provide administration and management to multiple contractors whose roles will vary by expertise but overall will help providers select products and provide training on how to use the technology to its fullest potential in order to improve patient care. This includes providing workforce support, implementation and project management, practice and workflow design, vendor selection, privacy and security best practices, progress towards meaningful use, functional interoperability and health information exchange.
The CWRU REC has a number of stakeholders, including University Hospitals, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative. In addition, the entities likely to participate in the CWRU REC include Kaiser Permanente, Medical Mutual of Ohio and CareSource.
“The School of Medicine is committed to improving the health of our community,” said Pamela B. Davis, MD, dean of the School of Medicine and vice president for medical affairs, CWRU. “We believe that HIT is a key tool in healthcare reform and we look forward to partnering with independent healthcare providers to encourage quick adoption of HIT. Once enabled, HIT provides a two-fold benefit: 1) improving patient care, for example, through electronic alerts that notify healthcare providers of a patient’s need for annual testing e.g., mammograms, and 2) by lowering healthcare costs by reducing redundant testing.”
The Case Western Reserve REC is expected to begin work sometime this month.
“Success for the CWRU REC will be measured in three ways,” said Rehm. “First, we must meet the milestones and metrics that are being asked of us by the federal government. Second, we must enable the earliest adoption possible which will allow primary care providers to pull in the maximum amount of federal dollars from reimbursements. And third, we must improve the quality of care through the utilization of this technology which will ultimately improve the health of Clevelanders.”
http://www.myemrstimulus.com/case-western-reserve-providers-adopt-ehrs-ohio/
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Voice Transcription Software To Grow A Medical Transcription Business
Companies who are in the medical transcription industry may underestimate the importance of a powerful voice transcription software platform. Consider for a moment that almost every function of that business will be affected by and handled by that system and it is easy to see how important it is to select the right one. Trying to save money on a system that does not significantly improve the productivity of medical transcriptionists can end up being a waste of capital.
There are many ways that voice transcription software can improve the profitability of a medical transcription business. The equation for making money is fairly simple; revenue has to go up and expenses must go down. The right voice transcription software platform can help a company to do both of these things.
In terms of reducing costs, things that medical transcription companies can look for in a software platform are advantages like local dictation telephone numbers that reduce the telephone bill. If a provider of this software has local numbers that are based in major centers across the country, then long distance charges will be minimized. It may not seem like a large expense, but when all of the clients that are dictating into a system are doing so for long periods of time and frequently then it can add up quickly.
Because the systems are so technical, often it can be beyond the abilities of the medical transcription company to maintain the voice transcription software and the servers that it will run on. This should be handled by the provider, and a good one will offer the large amount of storage space required at a good price. It will also be able to commit to having technical support available when it is needed.
Upgrades to the voice transcription software can also be expensive. When a transcription company is looking to engage a software provider, they should inquire about what kind of future costs they will have to shoulder for system upgrades. It is also important to know that upgrades can be facilitated without the need to bring down the system.
Improving profitability also has to do with increased revenue. If a voice transcription software platform can allow every medical transcriptionist to produce more in the same amount of time then this will have an effect on the company’s fortunes. This means having the ability to review and edit the document quickly and it also requires a seamless distribution of the work to medical transcriptionists. When documents are complete, it should also incorporate an automated system that delivers the finished product to clients.
Companies should move very carefully when they are considering purchasing a voice transcription software platform. It touches every department of their business and ones that provide a complete system will reduce the administrative burden on a company. When much of the tedium that was present in the industry in past years is eliminated by advanced software platforms, companies can then focus on retaining good talent and acquiring new clients.
Above Article publish on http://www.medicaltranscriptionoutsource.com/voice-transcription-software-grow-medical-transcription-business/
There are many ways that voice transcription software can improve the profitability of a medical transcription business. The equation for making money is fairly simple; revenue has to go up and expenses must go down. The right voice transcription software platform can help a company to do both of these things.
In terms of reducing costs, things that medical transcription companies can look for in a software platform are advantages like local dictation telephone numbers that reduce the telephone bill. If a provider of this software has local numbers that are based in major centers across the country, then long distance charges will be minimized. It may not seem like a large expense, but when all of the clients that are dictating into a system are doing so for long periods of time and frequently then it can add up quickly.
Because the systems are so technical, often it can be beyond the abilities of the medical transcription company to maintain the voice transcription software and the servers that it will run on. This should be handled by the provider, and a good one will offer the large amount of storage space required at a good price. It will also be able to commit to having technical support available when it is needed.
Upgrades to the voice transcription software can also be expensive. When a transcription company is looking to engage a software provider, they should inquire about what kind of future costs they will have to shoulder for system upgrades. It is also important to know that upgrades can be facilitated without the need to bring down the system.
Improving profitability also has to do with increased revenue. If a voice transcription software platform can allow every medical transcriptionist to produce more in the same amount of time then this will have an effect on the company’s fortunes. This means having the ability to review and edit the document quickly and it also requires a seamless distribution of the work to medical transcriptionists. When documents are complete, it should also incorporate an automated system that delivers the finished product to clients.
Companies should move very carefully when they are considering purchasing a voice transcription software platform. It touches every department of their business and ones that provide a complete system will reduce the administrative burden on a company. When much of the tedium that was present in the industry in past years is eliminated by advanced software platforms, companies can then focus on retaining good talent and acquiring new clients.
Above Article publish on http://www.medicaltranscriptionoutsource.com/voice-transcription-software-grow-medical-transcription-business/
Something for everyone to take note of: Medical Billing Companies
Thinking about integrating physician financial services into your future plans for your physician clinic isn’t a minor action to take. It’s a significant subject, covering an extensive list of benefits, all of which facilitate the effective running of your business whilst maximizing your profits. Cut down on those worries and pressures and ensure that you meet with each legal regulation. If you’re not already sure, let us tell you why you should make use of one of these billing services.
The key advantage of utilizing such a business is the serious amount of time it will save you. Just think of the hours spent, every week – consider the tracking, handling and invoicing and all those related chores which make up a medical center’s administration. Sometimes it even detracts from the care of clients. Working with an expert provider will mean that they take care of all these aspects, in addition to several other issues, for example copying, credit checking and collection and delivery services. Its duties might even include organizing plans for payments, or even processing compensation for workers.
Redeploying these tasks will give your medical staff the time to concentrate on what’s important – caring for clients in the most effective and efficient manner. It will cut back your costs and help stop you stressing out over those jobs. Don’t all clinic staff have more important things to be concerned about than billing industry methods? Professional medical billing services will concentrate totally on this special matter. They are experts in such rules, technologies and procedures involved with established medical billing processes. Not only will this save time, money and effort, it will rule out the likelihood of your health clinic confronting judicial issues. Accuracy is really important in billing services. However, when you work with expert help, you can relax, safe in the knowledge that standards are established to catch and resolve the infrequent unfortunate mistakes immediately.
Making use of specialist a specialist service like this is an intelligent financial investment for medical professionals such as GPs, physiotherapists and doctors, and services including health centers and infirmaries. However, concerns such as size and costing should not completely govern your choice from the various companies available – ensure that you search for the best company for your physician practice.
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/note-medical-billing-companies/
The key advantage of utilizing such a business is the serious amount of time it will save you. Just think of the hours spent, every week – consider the tracking, handling and invoicing and all those related chores which make up a medical center’s administration. Sometimes it even detracts from the care of clients. Working with an expert provider will mean that they take care of all these aspects, in addition to several other issues, for example copying, credit checking and collection and delivery services. Its duties might even include organizing plans for payments, or even processing compensation for workers.
Redeploying these tasks will give your medical staff the time to concentrate on what’s important – caring for clients in the most effective and efficient manner. It will cut back your costs and help stop you stressing out over those jobs. Don’t all clinic staff have more important things to be concerned about than billing industry methods? Professional medical billing services will concentrate totally on this special matter. They are experts in such rules, technologies and procedures involved with established medical billing processes. Not only will this save time, money and effort, it will rule out the likelihood of your health clinic confronting judicial issues. Accuracy is really important in billing services. However, when you work with expert help, you can relax, safe in the knowledge that standards are established to catch and resolve the infrequent unfortunate mistakes immediately.
Making use of specialist a specialist service like this is an intelligent financial investment for medical professionals such as GPs, physiotherapists and doctors, and services including health centers and infirmaries. However, concerns such as size and costing should not completely govern your choice from the various companies available – ensure that you search for the best company for your physician practice.
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/note-medical-billing-companies/
Monday, April 12, 2010
DEA issues interim e-prescribing rule
By Joseph Conn
The Drug Enforcement Administration has issued an interim final rule regulating electronic prescribing of controlled substances.
The 334-page rule also contains a request for comments. The rule affords prescribers the option of writing e-prescriptions for controlled drugs and also applies to pharmacies and hospitals.
According to a summary of the rule, it will “reduce paperwork for DEA registrants who dispense controlled substances and have the potential to reduce prescription forgery.”
“The regulations will also have the potential to reduce the number of prescription errors caused by illegible handwriting and misunderstood oral prescriptions,” according to the summary. “Moreover, they will help both pharmacies and hospitals to integrate prescription records into other medical records.”
The effective date of the rule is 60 days from its March 31 publication in the Federal Register, but as a “major rule,” it is subject to congressional review and, consequently, its effective date could be adjusted.
Above article publish on http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20100325/NEWS/100329985/1134
The Drug Enforcement Administration has issued an interim final rule regulating electronic prescribing of controlled substances.
The 334-page rule also contains a request for comments. The rule affords prescribers the option of writing e-prescriptions for controlled drugs and also applies to pharmacies and hospitals.
According to a summary of the rule, it will “reduce paperwork for DEA registrants who dispense controlled substances and have the potential to reduce prescription forgery.”
“The regulations will also have the potential to reduce the number of prescription errors caused by illegible handwriting and misunderstood oral prescriptions,” according to the summary. “Moreover, they will help both pharmacies and hospitals to integrate prescription records into other medical records.”
The effective date of the rule is 60 days from its March 31 publication in the Federal Register, but as a “major rule,” it is subject to congressional review and, consequently, its effective date could be adjusted.
Above article publish on http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20100325/NEWS/100329985/1134
56 Organizations Agree on Priorities for “Meaningful Use” Program
According to recommendations from a large collaboration of organizations, the success of the new federal incentives program for health information technology (“HIT”) largely depends on a specific set of health improvement goals, a prioritized set of metrics, and the widespread participation of health care providers and patients.
Health care leaders from 56 different organizations filed a joint public comment on the program, which is part of the economic stimulus in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“ARRA”). The Markle Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings coordinated the collaborative comments on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the Electronic Health Record Incentive Program.
The joint public comment recommends priorities to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), which will manage the new Medicare and Medicaid subsidies to doctors and hospitals for “meaningful use” of HIT starting in 2011.
The comment requests that HHS make clear a set of health improvement goals such as improving medication management and reducing readmissions to hospitals, so that everyone can contribute to these priorities.
Peter Basch, MD, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said: “As a practicing physician who has gone through the process of implementing health IT, I can say that it’s critical to set a bar that is ambitious but also achievable for the many diverse practices and hospitals that might participate in this program. We point out areas in which HHS can lower burdens on physicians without losing focus on the important goals of using health IT in ways that improve the patient’s experience and outcomes.”
Among other things, the collaborative letter stressed that the HIT program should encourage broad participation of providers by prioritizing the requirements necessary to receive payments and should enhance the ability of patients to obtain electronic copies of their health information.
Above article publish on http://pvwlaw.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/56-organizations-agree-on-priorities-for-%E2%80%9Cmeaningful-use%E2%80%9D-program/
Health care leaders from 56 different organizations filed a joint public comment on the program, which is part of the economic stimulus in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“ARRA”). The Markle Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings coordinated the collaborative comments on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the Electronic Health Record Incentive Program.
The joint public comment recommends priorities to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), which will manage the new Medicare and Medicaid subsidies to doctors and hospitals for “meaningful use” of HIT starting in 2011.
The comment requests that HHS make clear a set of health improvement goals such as improving medication management and reducing readmissions to hospitals, so that everyone can contribute to these priorities.
Peter Basch, MD, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said: “As a practicing physician who has gone through the process of implementing health IT, I can say that it’s critical to set a bar that is ambitious but also achievable for the many diverse practices and hospitals that might participate in this program. We point out areas in which HHS can lower burdens on physicians without losing focus on the important goals of using health IT in ways that improve the patient’s experience and outcomes.”
Among other things, the collaborative letter stressed that the HIT program should encourage broad participation of providers by prioritizing the requirements necessary to receive payments and should enhance the ability of patients to obtain electronic copies of their health information.
Above article publish on http://pvwlaw.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/56-organizations-agree-on-priorities-for-%E2%80%9Cmeaningful-use%E2%80%9D-program/
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