With all the changes happening to Meaningful Use, Quality Measurement, and MACRA in 2016, I’ve been asked many questions by many organizations to help them plan for the future. As I’ve said many times, one of the great challenges we have is that the 2015 Edition final rule has an enormous scope extending beyond Meaningful Use with the notion that it can be coupled to every government healthcare IT program. Standards need to be based on requirements and specific use cases with little optionality, so creating a broadly scoped rule before the use cases are known just doesn’t work...
Meaningful Use
See the following -
Breaking Down the Role of Patient Engagement in Meaningful Use
Patient engagement plays a great role in meaningful use, despite much industry debate and conflicting interests. Patient engagement is not just a new patient-centered care philosophy. For providers and hospitals participating in the EHR Incentive Programs, patient engagement is a critical part of receiving incentive payments. Between the different stages of meaningful use and new rule proposals amending the program, the requirements for patient engagement are not always clear.
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BT Bets on Medsphere's 'Open' EHR
Medsphere Systems and BT have agreed to jointly promote Medsphere's OpenVista EHR under a software-as-a-service, or SaaS, model. The goal, executives from both companies say, is to relieve hospitals of the many costly and burdensome IT responsibilities.
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BT to Offer Medsphere’s OpenVista Electronic Health Record
Open source health IT leader and established international IT services provider to promote SaaS open-platform solution Read More »
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careMESH Launches New Referral Management Module with Guaranteed Digital Delivery to Any U.S. Clinician
careMESH, the only service provider that guarantees 100% digital delivery of protected health information to any clinician nationwide, announced that it has expanded its secure communications capabilities to include a comprehensive referral management module. The built-in workflow tools and convenient administrative Task Manager make it easy for users to create a referral, attach a patient record and other relevant care information, and send it digitally to any other healthcare provider in the country. careMESH customers, including hospitals, large physician groups, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and others, use careMESH to send structured medical records, discharge summaries, secure messages, and other sensitive clinical information.
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Case Study: Achieving Meaningful Use Targets With careMESH Digital Referrals and Transitions of Care
The Medical Home Development Group (MHDG) is a Washington D.C.-based physician group which qualifies for the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program. On the heels of successfully meeting their Meaningful Use (MU-1) objective with the implementation of an Electronic Health Record (EHR), MHDG focused 2018 on seeking innovative ways to meet MU-2 measures through new digital referral and care transition processes...Quickly nearing the end of the performance period, MHDG chose the careMESH secure, cloud-based communications platform and embedded workflow tools to meet the measure in time. By retrieving patient records from their Sevocity EHR and using the careMESH multi-channel delivery approach to ensure truly digital sharing with all of the receiving providers, MHDG had an opportunity to complete its reporting requirements before year-end.
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CDC Issues RFI for Real-world Testing of Health Information Technology
In October the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Request for Information (RFI) for a Natural Test Collaborative (NTC). Through a series of questions, the RFI seeks opinions and information about "The development of a national testbed (notionally called the National Test Collaborative (NTC)) for real-world testing of health information technology (IT)" and "Approaches for creating a sustainable infrastructure" to achieve it. The scope of the questions is somewhat confusing and quite broad, starting with Clinical Decision Support (CDS) and electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) but quickly expanding to Electronic Health Records (EHR) and interoperability (not precisely defined).
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Clarifying MACRA Certification Requirements for Hospitals
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CMS Releases Proposed Updates to Medicare MIPS Promoting Interoperability Program for Physicians
On July 29, 2022 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) related to changes in the Medicare Program Physician Fee Schedule for 2013. Among the proposals in this lengthy document are those related to the Promoting Interoperability Program for physician practices, the successor to the Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology that was originally rooted in the 2009 HITECH Act. This program has been evolving over the years and this NPRM proposes some meaningful changes to the public health reporting component which would first be used for calendar year 2023.
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CommonWell Gives Patients Access to Records
CommonWell Health Alliance has launched a new program that is expected to give patients the capability of more easily accessing their health records. The initiative will begin with six electronic health record vendors: Aprima Medical Software, athenahealth, Cerner, Evident, Modernizing Medicine and RelayHealth. Two standalone patient portal vendors, Integrated Data Services and MediPortal, will offer an app enabling patients to access their records by year-end, says Jitin Asnaani...
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Congressman Offers 3-Point MU Fix
With $23 billion already spent on incentivizing providers to adopt electronic health records, many in government and industry are wondering whether taxpayers and patients got what they paid for...
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Consolidation of US Physician Practices Continues to Surge
The trend toward consolidation of physician practices in recent decades is accelerating, according to results of a new study published online September 7 in Health Affairs. "The proportion of physicians in groups of nine or fewer dropped from 40.1 percent in 2013 to 35.3 percent in 2015, while the proportion of those in groups of one hundred or more increased from 29.6 percent to 35.1 percent during the same time period," David B. Muhlestein, PhD, JD, and Nathan J. Smith, PhD, from Leavitt Partners, Salt Lake City, Utah, write. "Primary care physicians have made this change at a much faster pace than specialists have"...
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CORAnet Solutions Champions Patients’ Medical Record Access with Its Personal Health Information Exchange
It has been six years since the HITECH Act passed, yet most Americans seeking medical care are still unable to obtain their full medical records for a variety of reasons whether the hospital will not release them or proprietary EHR system vendors will not allow hospitals, let alone patients, direct access. One Healthcare 2.0 leader, CORAnet Solutions, has developed a tool that finally allows patients access to their complete medical records. This new breakthrough technology enables patients to take control of their personal medical data with CORAnet’s Personal Health Information Exchange (PHIE).
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Creating Beth Israel's FY16 Information Systems Strategic Plan
I recently wrote about the process of setting FY16 Clinical Information System Priorities for the next year. That project is proceeding well and in parallel I’ve created my own contribution. I do not want to influence the stakeholder consensus at all, but members of the IS Governance committee asked for my opinion. Here’s my thinking...Each year, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) Information Systems works with business owners to support BIDMC annual goals with information technology tactics. This ensures that the mission of BIDMC is supported by suitable operational tools. From 2012-2015, all hospitals in the US were compelled to focus their attention on Meaningful Use, ICD-10, the HIPAA Omnibus Rule, and the Affordable Care Act. Since those projects are nearly completed, it is important for BIDMC stakeholders to enumerate the new technology priorities which will best support their activities in the coming year. Read More »
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Dispatch from Denmark
Denmark is a remarkable country of 5 million people with a robust social support system. Healthcare is provided for life as part of being Danish. If you lose your job, generous unemployment benefits provide for the ongoing well being of you and your family. Income inequality is among the lowest in the world (see the world mapped by income inequality below). When people gather together in Denmark, there is a sense of common purpose and shared experiences. The Danish call this “hygge” or coziness. I spoke about the experiences of the Meaningful Use program, the evolving US reimbursement system, and the quest for innovation - especially in the areas of social networking for healthcare, mobile, analytics, and cloud hosting...
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Do We Need More or Less Healthcare IT Regulation and Legislation?
Just as I clarified last week in my post about Certification, the answer to the question “do we need more or less healthcare IT regulation and legislation” is that we need the right amount of the right regulations/legislation. Sometimes when clinicians prescribe medication, although it does therapeutic good, it creates side effects which need to be addressed by changing a dose or by adding additional medications. Such is the case with HITECH. It was generally good medicine, but now that we’ve seen the side effects on workflow, clinician burden, and efficiency, there needs to be a dose adjustment...
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