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/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)