James Madara

See the following -

AMA Calls For Reduced Requirements, Penalties For MU Program

Beth Walsh | Innovation + Technology | May 13, 2014

The American Medical Association (AMA) has a long list of ideas to make the Meaningful Use (MU) program better for physicians and shared its recommendations in a letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC)...

Read More »

AMA CEO Calls Digital Products Modern-Day ‘Snake Oil’

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | June 13, 2016

When it comes to electronic health record technology, the American Medical Association has been an outspoken critic about what it perceives as the shortcomings of EHRs, voicing the widespread dissatisfaction of the doctors who use the systems. However, the nation’s largest physician group is now taking aim at new and emerging health IT technologies—such as mobile healthcare apps—that it believes are leading to practice disruption...

Read More »

AMA: ICD-10 Costs More Expensive Than Prior Estimates

Dan Bowman | FierceHealthIT | February 12, 2014

ICD-10 implementation costs will be more expensive--in some cases more than three times previous cost estimates--for physician practices, according to updated research published Wednesday by the American Medical Association. Read More »

Complaints about Electronic Medical Records Increase

Bill Toland | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | August 3, 2014

Last month, the nation’‍s largest union of registered nurses sent a letter to the FDA asking for broader and more stringent oversight of electronic records systems and of computerized physician-order entry systems, which allow clinicians to log treatment instructions for patients. The National Nurses United, as part of its broader campaign highlighting the potential dangers of “unproven medical technology,” says FDA officials should test electronic medical records as rigorously as they might a new drug or an artificial hip implant...

Read More »

Halamka on Why he Disagrees with the "Snake Oil" Analogy

Earlier this week, the American Medical Association CEO called digital healthcare products modern-day "snake oil." As a provider and a technologist, I think we need a deeper dive to understand the issues, avoiding the kind of hyperbole that’s so common in politics today. Paul B. Batalden, MD, Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), once said “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”. Let’s take a brief look at the history of national healthcare IT efforts from 2004-2016 to understand how we’ve achieved exactly the results we designed.

Read More »

Not All Snake Oil Is Digital

A different take on "snake oil" in health care was a thoughtful piece in Health Affairs, by David Newman and Amanda Frost, discussing the quality measurement morass in health care. They cite a study that estimated we spend some $15.4b annually collecting several thousand different quality measures, few of which have any meaning to consumers and all-too-few of which seem to be used to actively improve quality. It isn't that they don't think we should be measuring quality -- far from it -- but, rather: "Patients should not be able to choose substandard quality care, and substandard quality care should not be allowed to be offered in the market." Now, there's a novel concept!

Read More »

The 'Digital Dystopia': 4 Thoughts from AMA CEO Dr. James Madara

Akanksha Jayanthi | Becker's Health IT & CIO Review | June 13, 2016

Not all digital tools are created equal, and some of these tools are detrimental to patient care. This was the message James Madara, MD, executive vice president and CEO of the American Medical Association, expressed in his address at the 2016 AMA Annual Meeting. Dr. Madara compared the current digital health landscape, "something I might call our digital dystopia", to the "quackery" of snake oil remedies.Here are four thoughts from Dr. Madara's address...

Read More »

Update: CMS, ONC Ease EHR Certification Requirements For MU

Tom Sullivan, | Government Health IT | May 30, 2014

Healthcare providers and the IT vendors who serve them just got a dose of welcome relief from the increasingly controversial certification pieces of meaningful use.

Read More »