Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)

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Practicing in an Age of Uncertainty

If you've ever had a hard time trying to decide what's best for your health (e.g., Sorry, There's Nothing Magical About Breakfast), perhaps you can take comfort in the fact that physicians often aren't so sure either. Or perhaps not. A new study in Annals of Surgery, and nicely reported on  by Julia Belluz in Vox, focused on surgical uncertainty.  The researchers sent four detailed clinical vignettes to a national sample of surgeons, seeking to get their assessment on the risks/benefits of operative and non-operative treatment, as well as their recommendations. You'd like to think there was good consensus on what to do, but that was not the case...

Precision Medicine: Analytics, Data Science and EHRs in the New Age

John Andrews | Healthcare IT News | August 15, 2016

The promise of genomics and personalized care are closer than many realize. But clinical systems and EHRs are not ready yet. While policymakers and innovators play catch-up, here’s a look at what you need to know. Considering how fast technology advances in the healthcare industry, it seems natural that a once-innovative concept could become obsolete in the span of, say, a dozen years. Knowledge, comprehension and capabilities continue moving forward, and if the instruments of support don't keep pace, it can cause a rift to appear. If nothing is done, it can exacerbate into a seismic event...

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Preliminary Thoughts on CMS Proposed MIPS IP Rule Changes: A Public Health Perspective

Well, here we go again. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has now released a new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM)...The purpose of this NPRM is to address proposed changes for Year 3 of the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), the provider (as opposed to hospital) side of the Quality Payment Program. The part that is most relevant to public health is the Medicaid Promoting Interoperability (IP) Program for Eligible Professionals (EP)” (the EHR Incentive Programs have been renamed). A major goal of this NPRM is to synchronize as much as possible the EP program with the hospital-based program that was addressed in a previous NPRM just a few months ago.

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Providers Welcome Meaningful Use Relief

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare It News | February 28, 2014

There will be no delay for ICD-10 conversion. But when CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner announced Thursday at HIMSS14 that CMS would be flexible on hardship exemptions for meaningful use requirements, it provided some of the relief healthcare providers – and the professional organizations that represent them – have been seeking...

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Puerto Rico’s Health-Care Crisis Threatens the Mainland

Mattie Quinn | Governing | March 1, 2016

Just a few years ago, New York had a health-care crisis on its hands. The state was spending $50 billion a year on Medicaid in 2011 -- more than any other state in the country. Health-care officials in New York worked together to bring down spending, and last year the state introduced an $8 billion plan to repurpose its whole program, with a focus on outpatient care and community health. But now the state is facing another threat to its health-care system: Puerto Rico. America’s biggest territory continues to find itself in serious financial trouble, with a current debt of $72 billion, which the territory’s governor has declared "not payable"...

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RNs Urge Tougher Federal Oversight On Unproven Medical Technology On which Hospitals Spend Billions

Press Release | National Nurses United | July 8, 2014

National Nurses United is calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to enact meaningful oversight and public protections on the use of unproven medical technology that is rapidly spreading through the nation’s healthcare system...

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RowdMap, Inc. Speaks at Health:Further Summit on Creating High-Value Care from Open Health Data

Press Release | RowdMap, Inc. | August 16, 2016

Joshua Rosenthal, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder at RowdMap, Inc., will be speaking on how health plans and physicians and hospitals create high-value care with open data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), thirty cents of every dollar goes to low-value care, or care that has higher risks and costs but does not produce better outcomes. According to researchers, if low-value care were removed, there would be more than enough care to cover the population...

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Rush Medical Center Demoes Patient-Centered Blue Button 2.0 Mobile App at White House Event

Press Release | Rush University Medical Center | August 17, 2018

Information technology has changed the world, and now it’s changing health care in dramatic and fast-moving ways. Rush is a nationally-recognized leader in using IT to achieve better outcomes, lower costs and improve the patient experience. This leadership reached the White House on Monday, when...Rab and Boutrs presented MyRush Mobile, an app for mobile phones developed by Rush’s information systems department, to representatives of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, including CMS director Seema Verma. The presentation was part of the Blue Button 2.0 Conference, a gathering of software developers held in the White House South Court Auditorium.

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Sending Medicaid to the Cloud

David Raths | government technology | January 12, 2016

Led by Wyoming, states are ready to pioneer MMIS as a service. The Wyoming state government already has considerable experience with cloud-based services. It uses Google Apps for Government, NEOGOV for human resources and is looking at Salesforce.com for customer relationship management. But as its Department of Health prepares to issue an RFP to replace its Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS), all eyes in the Medicaid IT sector are on Wyoming because it will be the first time a state has tried to move away from an expensive custom-developed system to an MMIS-as-a-service approach.

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Sequestration Can’t Halt Government’s ‘Historic’ Health IT Spending

Frank Konkel | Nextgov | July 21, 2016

Federal health IT spending grew 27 percent annually from fiscal 2011-2015, with the market jumping from $2 billion four years ago to $6.5 billion in fiscal 2015, according to research from big data and analytics firm Govini. Civilian health agencies fueled health IT spending the most. The Health and Human Services Department increased its annual health IT spend by a compound annual growth rate of 34 percent, with about half of its total obligations driven by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is preparing for a major modernization effort and call center upgrade...

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Stage 3 Meaningful Use – Objectives and Measures Summary

Last Friday (3/20/15) the ONC released the proposed rule for Stage 3 Meaningful Use (MU3).  Whenever this type of document is released, I find it useful to summarize the objectives and measures from the background and details into a more concise format.  It was tedious work, but in the end it saves me paging through a 301 page document. I figured that if I found it useful, others might as well, so I posted the summary on the Clinical Architecture blog.  Our mission is to help evolve the clinical architecture of the healthcare industry.  A big part of that has to do with terminology, since terminologies are the language of healthcare solutions.  These Meaningful Use initiatives are fundamentally about how we share and use terminology.  Understanding the planned objectives and proposed measures allows us to provide feedback to the ONC and help our partners prepare for what is coming.

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Success Of Blue Button Initiative Tied To MU Program

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | July 1, 2014

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT this fall will launch a national campaign to boost consumer use of Blue Button technology to securely access their health records electronically...The national Blue Button campaign, which runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 6, will include public service announcements posted on partner websites to get the word out on how consumers can access their own health data.

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Survey: Less Than 10% Of Physician Practices Ready For ICD-10

Dan Bowman | FierceHealthIT | February 5, 2014

Less than 10 percent of practices responding to a survey issued by the Medical Group Management Association are ready for the transition to ICD-10 [...]. While the number is up from 4.7 percent who indicated readiness last summer, it adds to a growing chorus of providers and payers who indicate they aren't ready to switch from using ICD-9 coding. Read More »

Tampa General Hospital and USF Health Implement careMESH to Advance Care Team Collaboration with Community Providers

Press Release | careMESH, Tampa General Hospital, USF Health | September 9, 2020

careMESH today announced that it has launched its services with both Tampa General Hospital (TGH) and USF Health (USF). Integrated with TGH's Epic Electronic Medical Record (EMR), patient admission and discharge notifications are automatically and digitally sent to the patient's primary care physician, and clinical staff are able to send referrals and transitions of care to any provider in the country. "We have long sought new ways to engage with the community and better communicate and collaborate with partner physicians and practices while ensuring operational efficiency and patient privacy. We were drawn to careMESH because they solve a key challenge: how to move all communications with external clinicians to digital communications," said Scott Arnold, Executive VP & Chief Information Officer for Tampa General Hospital.

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Tech Giants Back White House Open Source Health IT Initiative

Six major technology companies have thrown their support behind the White House's initiative to use an open source, collaborative, approach to accelerate the progress of health data standards and interoperability and to give patients access and control of their medical records. The companies; Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce signed a pledge that was presented at the White House's Blue Button 2.0 developer conference. The conference took place last Monday. Dean Garfield, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) told the press that “As transformative technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence continue to advance, it is important that we work towards creating partnerships that embrace open standards and interoperability.

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