|
The American Hospital Association (AHA) has offered an alternative approach for the definition of meaningful use, including the addition of 12 objectives to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Four chief information officers, who are also members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), testified before the Implementation Workgroup federal panel this week on the challenges they foresee in implementing EHRs, under the current definition outlined in the interim final rule of meaningful use.
Partial adoption of meaningful use of health IT should result in the receiving of partial fiscal incentives, wrote Ted Epperly, MD, board chair of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), in a letter to Charlene M. Frizzera, acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
A survey from the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) found that 76 percent of respondents from mostly independent medical practices believe that the government should fully pilot test the 2013 and 2015 meaningful use criteria before requiring them.
ATLANTA–Thomson Reuters showcased an array of products focusing on the upcoming meaningful use requirements and interoperability, including its latest Pharmacy Intervention application, at HIMSS10 this week.
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is questioning whether the current proposed regulations in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) EHR Incentive Program allot enough time for providers to achieve meaningful use before they are penallized.
Written by Neil Versel
Among the many differences between the proposed regulations for “meaningful use” of electronic health records and a draft circulated last summer is that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) now wants hospitals and physician practices to implement clinical decision support (CDS) for a minimum of five high-priority conditions in order to qualify for federal subsidies in 2011.
Written by Mary Stevens
ATLANTA -- The government doesn’t want to be in the software business, said Vish Sankaran, Federal Healthcare Architecture (FHA) program director at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. Sankaran described the FHA’s work on CONNECT in an interview with CMIO.
ATLANTA–At a roundtable discussion at HIMSS, David Blumenthal, MD, National Coordinator for Health IT, took a range of questions from about three dozen AMDIS members and physician IT leaders and emphasized the need for CMIOs and healthcare professionals to submit their comments to CMS as well as their congressional representatives.
Written by Justine Cadet
ATLANTA—Disseminating physician scorecards within a healthcare facility can be a powerful tool to drive clinical practice change, if the cultural barriers can be overcome, according to a presentation by an informatics executive from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston Monday at HIMSS10.
|
The time frame and requirements for meaningful use, and the “all-or-nothing” incentive structure of the CMS incentives are major concerns of College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) members, said Sharon Canner, CHIME senior director of advocacy programs, in an interview with CMIO. CHIME has posted its response to the CMS’ proposed meaningful use rules, and Canner encourages providers to examine the document and adapt it in their own responses. See the CMIO video here.
ATLANTA—Meaningful use—a concept introduced one year ago—appears to be spurring an increase in health IT spending along with a brightening economy, according to the 21 annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) leadership survey, released today during the society’s conference.
ATLANTA--David Hunt, MD, chief medical officer and acting director of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), described the work ahead for his agency. “At ONC, 2010 is a bit of a moment. It’s incredibly exciting and more than a little bit scary,” Hunt conveyed during the opening keynote of the Physicians IT Symposium today at HIMSS10.
Written by Gina Narcisi
In a post-2015 era, both technology and infrastructure need to be transformed across ambulatory healthcare settings large and small, according to John Blair III, MD, president of Taconic IPA in Fishkill, N.Y., who made this presentation today at HIMSS10 in Atlanta.
Written by Editorial Staff
Clinical decision support has reached a critical juncture. Technology improvements enable CDS systems to gather a wider variety of patient data to provide more useful advice that assists clinicians’ decision making. Converging standards and integration initiatives enable more stand-alone CDS tools to work together in actual systems.
Written by Editorial Staff
Tuesday, March 2, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
The government has taken unprecedented steps to support the adoption of EHRs for physician practices through the passage of the ARRA. This session will look into the future and envision what a practice would look like if it took advantage of an EHR implementation after 2015.
Medical practice leaders cited multiple, continued administrative challenges with reporting data for Medicare's Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI), according to a survey released Feb. 17 by the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA).
The Georgia Department of Community Health has been award $13 million by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to support the state’s effort to expand EHR use and create the infrastructure for health information exchange (HIE).
The proposed Medicaid expansion is characterized as the largest public administration challenge that states have ever faced, but with adequate support from government and private philanthropies, the program has the potential to become a national leader in effective, high-quality care over the next five years, according to a recent article in Health Affairs.
The FDA today launched an initiative to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure from three types of medical imaging procedures: CT, nuclear medicine studies and fluoroscopy.
|
RSS 
The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule of meaningful use.
The state of Maine currently has the largest operating statewide exchange in the country in relation to population. Although Devore Culver, Executive Director of Maine’s HealthInfoNet, expects that distinction to change in the months ahead, the state’s HIE is entering the final months of its demonstration phase, and is slated to move in to its full statewide implementation in the second half of 2010. Culver, who is former CIO of Eastern Maine Health Care, recently spoke with CMIO about the progress HealthInfoNet has made.
In 2006, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the FDA, began examining the number of medical device reports they received. Over the past two years, the number of submitted reports has increased, sparking a demand for the CDRH to make a move to electronic reporting.
A new hospital breaking ground usually isn’t breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.
