By Brian Smith / Register News Writer The days of a white-coated doctor taking a pen from his pocket and making notations in a file are long gone. With computers becoming smaller, cheaper and more portable, health care professionals are replacing paper records with electronic records that can be instantly accessed. The Madison County Health Department’s home health division, MEPCO Home Health, is in the process of implementing an electronic [...]
$1.2 Billion Slated for HITECH Priority Grant Programs By News Staff Nearly $1.2 billion soon will be available to help the nation’s hospitals, physicians and other health care professionals purchase and use electronic health records, or EHRs, according to an Aug. 20 announcement from Vice President Joe Biden. Money from the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health, or HITECH, Act priority grant programs, which are funded by the [...]
The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology is moving forward with plans to launch a new, less comprehensive electronic health records software certification program in light of the federal economic stimulus package. In October, the commission plans to launch a more limited, modular inspection program for EHR software, focusing only on compliance with standards required for “meaningful use” of EHRs under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Rather than wait [...]
By Neil Versel Vice President Joe Biden, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and national health IT coordinator Dr. David Blumenthal are in Chicago today to announce $1.2 billion in federal grants to promote EMR use and interoperability. The money represents the bulk of the $2 billion in stimulus funds allocated to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Of the $1.2 billion, the administration plans to spend $589 [...]
By Anne Zieger The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has announced that it will provide a series of grants totaling $48 million that can be used to develop national patient registries for comparative effectiveness research. Clinical registries are one of a number of approaches to helping providers identify the long-term effects of treatments, along with clinical data networks and other forms of health IT networking. This is part of [...]
Obama administration rolled out a program to make $1.2 billion grants available to help the nation’s health care system transition to electronic medical records. The grants are part of a $48.8 billion chunk of the economic stimulus bill devoted to health information technology, including grants for individual doctors to help cover the costs of converting from paper records. These grants were approved by Congress under the economic stimulus bill, but [...]
by Mahoney, Diana “E-prescribing saves lives, it saves money, and it’s time we implement it,” according to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. Streamlining the bloated health care system “is an economic imperative for our country. We have to get down to making the system better, and [e-prescribing] is one piece of a large puzzle,” he stressed at a conference on e-prescribing sponsored by the Centers for Medicare and [...]
The Social Security Administration plans to make wider use of electronic medical records to process disability applications. By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee The Social Security Administration is planning to award $24 million in contracts to implement electronic medical records that would improve its disability program’s application process. Under the agency’s new Medical Evidence Gathering and Analysis Through Health IT program, Social Security will electronically receive clinical information from healthcare providers treating [...]
By Neil Versel After months of being the target of critics both legitimate and questionable, the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology is reasserting itself in the EMR marketplace. Last week, the federal Health IT Policy Committee signed off on recommendations from its Workgroup on Certification and Adoption that there should be multiple bodies to certify EMRs for participation in the multibillion-dollar Medicare and Medicaid EMR subsidy program authorized by [...]
As the Obama administration works to garner support for healthcare reform, about $1.2 billion in grants were announced on Friday to help hospitals and healthcare providers implement and use electronic health records. Announcing the grants in Chicago, US Vice President Joe Biden said the $1.2 billion would be funded by the $787 billion economic stimulus plan. “With electronic health records, we are making health care safer; we are making it [...]
By Anne Zieger If the state’s governor gets his way, Kentucky will soon be home to a statewide electronic health records system. To foster that goal, State Gov. Steve Beshear (D) has created the Governor’s Office of Electronic Health Information. The state is creating the office to make sure it gets its share of the Obama administration’s stimulus funding package for EHRs, which goes to states who adopt them by [...]
By Ken Congdon, Healthcare Technology Online In my coverage of the healthcare technology industry, I’ve noticed that many software and hardware vendors, clinicians, and even some analysts tend to use the terms EMR (electronic medical record) and EHR (electronic health record) interchangeably. However, according to the National Alliance for Health Information Technology (NAHIT), there is a distinct difference between the two. The NAHIT defines EMR and EHR as follows: EMR [...]
The U.S. healthcare system works better for insurance companies than it does for citizens, President Barack Obama wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece Sunday. Obama said Congress must pass healthcare reform this year to weaken the power of insurance companies and protect the millions of U.S. residents who lack insurance or pay too much for it. “If we maintain the status quo, we will continue to see 14,000 [...]
By Joseph Conn Another month, another matrix in the development of definitions of “meaningful use,” the key criteria providers must meet to unlock tens of billions of dollars of federal healthcare information technology subsidies under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Health Information Technology Policy Committee, a creature of the stimulus law, received a third set of recommendations from its meaningful-use work group. The recommendations were again [...]
By David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology A Message from Dr. David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology In my role as National Coordinator for Health IT, I have the privilege to be part of a transformative change in health care that will help to extend the benefits of health information technology (HIT) to all Americans. With the passage earlier this year of the Health Information Technology [...]
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