Many people have asked me to review the Quality Payment Program final rule, released on October 14, 2016. Several summaries have already been written but your best bet is to rely on the CMS Quality Payment Program website at https://qpp.cms.gov. Yes, the rule is still complex - over 2400 pages, of which more than 50% is the mandated response to comments made on the proposed rule. The good news is that CMS has been very responsive to feedback, creating a transition plan for adoption, reducing the number of criteria and extending the timeline which enables iterative learning before large scale implementation. Under the Quality Payment Program, clinicians have two approaches to choose from for reimbursement: the Merit-based Incentive program (MIPS) and Advanced Alternative Payment Models (APMs)...
patient access
See the following -
The Quality Payment Program Final Rule
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This EHR Mess We’re In
Dr. Matthew Hahn blogs about the current state of today’s EHR’s and rightly points out many of the same reasons that I have identified in my previous posts...There are several other important concerns that have been left unanswered by our current Health IT offerings...The solution Dr. Hahn proposed is one that hinges on the hope that government will abandon MU (unlikely given this political climate), and create a whole new EHR development program based on a national competition and then for the government to subsidize the cost of that winner EHR for physicians to use...
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Todd Park: Patient Engagement Will 'Vastly' Improve Healthcare
Addressing a packed room at the Health Privacy Summit in Washington, D.C., this week, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park emphasized the importance of federal efforts to engage patients in their own healthcare. Read More »
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Universal EHR? No. Universal Data Access? Yes.
A recent blog posting calls for a “universal EMR” for the entire healthcare system. The author provides an example and correctly laments how lack of access to the complete data about a patient impedes optimal clinical care. [...] However, I do not agree that a “universal EMR” is the best way to solve this problem. Read More »
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Ways To Put The Patient First When Collecting Health Data
The timing was superb for last week’s Health Privacy Summit, held on June 5 and 6 in Washington, DC. First, it immediately followed the 2000-strong Health Data Forum (Health Datapalooza), where concern for patients rights came up repeatedly. Read More »
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What’s In Store For Health IT In 2014?
2013 was a good year for health IT and has laid the foundation for 2014 to be the biggest year ever for the industry. Read More »
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Why Apple HealthKit in iOS 10 Makes View/Download/Transmit Real
Meaningful Use Stage 2 has a requirement that I’ve always considered to be the “cart before the horse” - patients must be able to View/Download/Transmit their data. Viewing is great - we’ve done that at BIDMC since 1999 for all patients and all data. Download makes little sense since at the moment there is nothing a patient can do with a download. Of the 2 million patients at BIDMC, not one has ever requested a download. Transmit makes even less sense since there is no place to transmit the data to...
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Why EHR Interoperability Requires Health IT Infrastructure
Healthcare organizations are still challenged by EHR interoperability, and are seeking health IT infrastructure tools to ensure data is accurately, efficiently, and securely shared. Eagle Physicians and Associates and Cone Health announced the successful exchange between the eClinicalWorks cloud-based EHR and the Epic EHR for improved EHR interoperability among multiple locations and health systems. Eagle Physicians needed a way to provide better quality care to patients as those individuals move among locations...
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“I Want to Know What Code Is Running Inside My Body”
At age 33, Marie Moe learned that her heart might fail her at any moment. A computer security expert in Norway, she found out she has a fairly common heart condition that disrupts her normal pulse, so she had to get a pacemaker. The surgery was quick and uncomplicated. Just a few weeks later she was able to travel to London for a course on ethical hacking...
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