Health Care It Scope

Hospital chief information officers are less confident than they were only a few months ago about their ability to meet federal requirements for meaningful use of electronic medical records. The biggest obstacle, they say, is getting physicians to use...

By Ken Terry Terry Hashey, a family physician in Jacksonville, Fla., remembers how the e-prescribing application in his electronic health record helped him when a new patient presented at his office with an acute problem. She had just flown in from out...

Innovative Hospital Stars in “Raiders of the Lost Charge” Physician charge capture and coding. It is a simple enough activity; after all, your physicians engage in the practice daily. What could go wrong? The truth is: a lot. Accurate physician...

Surescripts, the Nation’s E-Prescription Network, today announced that eight vendors representing nine physician software products have completed Gold certification. The resulting Gold Solution Provider status is granted to vendors with software...

By Timothy W. Martin Doctors are increasingly prescribing medications electronically, abandoning the traditional paper scripts that can result in drug errors due to hard-to-read writing or coverage denials by a patient's insurer. The number of...

Weill Cornell Medical College-Led Study Is One of the First to Compare E-Prescriptions to Handwritten Prescriptions in Community-Based Practices Should doctors around the country use e-prescribing to decrease prescription errors? A study led by...

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...

By Elizabeth Cooney Patients who do not take their medications as prescribed pay a price in poorer health, more frequent hospitalizations, and a higher risk of death. Collectively, they also incur up to $290 billion annually in increased medical...

Maria A. Friedman, Anthony Schueth and Douglas S. Bell Abstract Although the vast majority of U.S. physicians still handwrite prescriptions, adoption of electronic prescribing is slowly growing. Major barriers to adoption remain, including the...

The Department of Health and Human Services ("HHS") issued comprehensible, no surprises guidance under the final HIPAA privacy rule that went into effect on April 14, 2001. From the perspective of all but the health care provider community, the guidance...

by Mark Sanchez | Business Review Western Michigan He gave up the paper pad four years ago and now only writes prescriptions for patients electronically. While Dr. Richard Smith can't specifically quantify the results, he knows without any...

Florida's medical examiners recently reported that prescription medicines caused more deaths in 2008 than illicit drugs. The medical examiners also reported sharp increases in deaths caused by prescription tranquilizers and painkillers, such as Oxycodone...

The AMA has created an extensive online resource. By the close of 2008, only about 13% of physicians were prescribing electronically. The prescription pad and pen still rule in most offices. But doctors are getting a nudge to automate their...

SURESCRIPTS RELEASES ANNUAL STATE RANKINGS AND PROGRESS REPORTS DETAILING E-PRESCRIBING USE AND ADOPTION STATISTICS FOR ALL 50 STATES Massachusetts Prescribers Now Route More Than 20 Percent of Prescriptions Electronically, Followed by Rhode Island at...

The percentage of medical prescriptions routed electronically from a physician’s office to a pharmacy hit 6.4 percent in North Carolina in 2008, giving the state a sixth-place national ranking, according to survey by St. Paul, Minn.-based Surescripts, a...