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Delivering Quality Health IT Industry & Government News, Insights and Trends that are Physician Focused and Patient Driven®!
In this month’s newsletter, our topics include:
Monthly HHS & CMS Update:
2014 Outlook On Health IT
Hospital leaders and office-based physicians will face daunting Healthcare Information Technology stress tests in the coming year.
One test is underway for some, who have to meet stepped-up Stage 2 meaningful-use criteria for electronic health-record systems. For hospitals that had achieved Stage 1 meaningful use for two or three years under the program, the one-year Stage 2 window opened at the start of the federal fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2013.
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Meaningful Use is Good for Business
Remember the old days? Way back before 2009? Healthcare had some catching up to do. But no one quite knew just how to do it.
So much of the industry was still paper based. Where technology was deployed, it was often siloed systems in ancillary hospital departments, or rudimentary software helping to run physician practices.
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Patients Now Paying Attention To Meaningful Use
Meaningful use — it’s not just for healthcare providers anymore. Patients are paying attention to what meaningful use of electronic health data entails and why it’s important; they’re understanding, and now they want it.
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Stage 3 MU Is Driving Health IT Interoperability
The push for meaningful use Stage 3 has reached a point where a confluence of power structures are ready for more breakthroughs – hence, the impetus for collaboration among IHE USA, ONC and S&I Framework, officials from these groups say.
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2014 – The Year For HIE
The growth of the cloud, the emergence of payers and the race to analytics now present several large challenges to health information exchange organizations, Chilmark Research argues in a “baker’s dozen” of 2014 forecasts.
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Perspective On The ROI Of Health IT
Hard numbers for return on investment in health IT aren’t always measurable, at least in a direct way. Instead, healthcare organizations need to look at both “hard” and “soft” savings when considering a system’s ROI.
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Study Finds EHRs Help Physicians Improve Patient Care
A new study in the journal Health Services Research finds nearly three-quarters of physicians using electronic health records in 2011 said there were clinical benefits when patients’ medical histories were kept in digital files. The study focused on doctors’ perceptions of clinical benefits to patient care when EHRs were in place.
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CDC Report Cites Physicians Not Prepared For Stage 2 MU
The Stage 2 numbers for eligible docs are, some might say, a little bit scary.
Most office-based physicians are not prepared for the October 2014 beginning attestation date. In fact, many aren’t even close. Only 13 percent say their electronic health record systems have the abilities to support 14 of the 17 core Stage 2 objectives, according to a new CDC trends report released last week.
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Monthly HHS & CMS Update:
CMS EHR Incentive Payments Approach $20B
Electronic health record incentive payments to eligible docs and hospitals continue to climb into the new year. The “inexorable progress” of the federal EHR incentive program continues, with payments to providers moving ever closer to $20 billion.
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ONC Looses Authorized EHR Certification Body
The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology will stop offering ONC testing and certification services. Instead, CCHIT will work toward increased IT interoperability by counseling providers and developers on certified EHR requirements.
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ONC Releases Safety Assurance Factors For “SAFER” Use Of EHR’s
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has released what it calls Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience guides: nine toolkits to help providers make safer use of electronic health records and other technology.
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OIG Report Calls Out CMS For EHR Fraud Failings
Electronic health records may be doing great things for patient care, but they have also made it easier to commit fraud, according to the findings of a new report from the Office of Inspector General.
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OIG Releases “Best Practices” To Prevent EHR Fraud
A federal watchdog says the CMS and its Medicare contractors could do more to ensure providers don’t use electronic health-record systems as a means to fraudulent ends.
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CMS Names New Top Senior Executives
CMS has moved quickly to replace two recently departed senior executives. The experience levels of the announced replacements should allay concerns that the mini-exodus, which some saw as fallout from launch issues with HealthCare.gov, would hurt agency operations, former CMS insiders agreed.
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