The sweeping health overhaul law turns 2 years old this Friday. And as it heads toward a constitutional showdown at the Supreme Court next week, the debate over the measure remains almost as heated as the day President Obama signed it into law. In fact, public opinion about the law remains divided along partisan lines to almost exactly the same extent it was when the law was signed on March [...]
A national network of cancer hospitals that has relied heavily on laptop computers for clinicians accessing electronic health records is phasing in iPads and iPhones, taking steps to mitigate the security risks involved. As it rolls out Apple mobile devices, Cancer Treatment Centers of America initially is limiting users to view-only access to clinical information, says Chad A. Eckes, CIO. At first, clinicians won’t be able to use the devices to place [...]
President Obama tapped as the federal government’s chief technology officer Todd Park, who had been serving as the CTO at the Department of Health and Human Services. Park replaces Aneesh Chopra, the government’s first CTO, who resigned last month [see Aneesh Chopra Resigns as Federal CTO]. Chopra also had been serving as the associate director of technology in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a position Park [...]
There’s consensus that the architecture of a nationwide health information network (NwHIN) is shifting. But there’s less agreement as to whether this change is a favorable development. That’s the upshot of a panel of experts, addressing the issue in a roundtable discussion held this week by the National e-health Collaborative, a public-private partnership established by a grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) to foster [...]
The Department of Health and Human Services on Feb. 16 issued a statement announcing its intent to push back the Oct. 1, 2013, compliance deadline for ICD-10 “for certain health care entities:” As part of President Obama’s commitment to reducing regulatory burden, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen G. Sebelius today announced that HHS will initiate a process to postpone the date by which certain health care entities have to [...]
LAS VEGAS – At HIMSS12 this week, Health Level Seven International (HL7) announced a pilot program that will offer some of its intellectual property, free of charge, in an effort to spur further EHR implementations. “HL7 is keeping its promise to lower the barriers to adoption of electronic healthcare records by making portions of our valuable intellectual property freely available to our stakeholders,” said Charles Jaffe, MD, CEO of HL7. [...]
In the “real” world, people expect to pay more for something if it’s of higher quality or offers superior performance. That free-market standard promotes higher-quality products and services. The healthcare industry, however, generally does not operate in this manner. Patients have few options for “kicking the tires,” so to speak, before electing to start a drug treatment, undergo surgery or therapy, or choose a physician. This inability to get a [...]
A provider’s essential critical knowledge is often so obscured that the EHR becomes more of an obstacle than a useful source of clinical information. The meaningful use-compliant electronic health record (EHR) has quickly become very adept at capturing and sharing standardized, structured clinical content that can be communicated, stored, and to some extent consumed by other systems. Unfortunately, this strength is also the EHR’s greatest limitation. Amid the structured templates [...]
It’s easy to make predictions about health IT for the year to come, but what if someone asked what your IT wishes were for 2012? What would you like to see happen most in the health IT space? We asked Wendy Whittington, MD, a practicing pediatrician and chief medical officer of Anthelio Healthcare Solutions, to list her top 10 IT wishes for 2012. From interoperability to telehealth, Whittington outlined what [...]
With Medicare’s push toward shared savings and accountable care organizations, healthcare business models are getting more complex, said Shahid Shah, software IT analyst and author of the blog The Healthcare IT Guy. The industry needs software to implement these new models. “Due to the new intricacies of organizational connections between different providers, standardization of workflows on existing EHRs won’t really be possible,” Shah says. “Most EHRs are not up to the [...]
Hospitals and eligible professionals will continue to report clinical quality measures for electronic health records meaningful use via attestation in 2012, just as they must do this year. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services remains unable to electronically accept clinical quality measures. It has confirmed the attestation model for next year in separate final rules setting Medicare’s hospital outpatient prospective payment policies and the physician fee schedule. As in [...]
Regional extension centers can help you select and implement an electronic health record system and attest to meaningful use. There are 62 RECs spread across the country. Implementing an electronic health record (EHR) system in your primary care practice is no small task. You must consider hundreds of individual elements about the system itself, plus the cost, the hit to your practice’s productivity during installation, and, of course, compliance with [...]
Health Data Management is now accepting nominations for its 2nd Annual EHR Game Changers recognition program, created to honor individuals who have been true game changers in the design, advocacy, deployment and development of electronic health records technology. Individuals from across the spectrum of industry stakeholders–hospitals, group practices, payers, associations, federal and state governments, and health technology vendors–have helped in the evolution of EHR technology and its increasing adoption by [...]
HealthAmerica and Preferred Primary Care Physicians have launched a new pilot program aimed at providing more coordinated and patient-centered primary care and improved communications among patients, physicians and care teams. Preferred consists of 32 board-certified physicians and five physician extenders specializing in internal medicine and family practice. It has 14 practice locations in the South Hills and three locations in Uniontown in Fayette County. In addition, Preferred offers state-of-the-art outpatient [...]
Care for patients with diabetes improved appreciably when their physicians use electronic health records (EHRs) extensively, according to a recent study. Physicians who participated in the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative from 2006 to 2008 significantly increased their ability to generate and use registries for laboratory results and medication usage. The more actively physicians used their EHRs, the more they used registries, particularly for care of patients with diabetes. Researchers looked at [...]
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