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WSJ CIO Journal: One Stanford Doctor Wants to Focus on Real Patients, Not iPatients
Electronic medical records don’t always reflect what really happens during an examination. Physicians are so busy checking off boxes and keying in vital signs that sometimes they spend more time with the virtual patient than the real one.
“Many of us recognized that there was a gap between what the medical record claimed was done on the patient, in a sense, and the actual execution of the task,” Dr. Abraham Verghese, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and best-selling novelist, said in a Thursday Wall Street Journal article. “It reflects an increasing dependence on technology and paying lip-service to the actual examination of the patient,” he said.
Creators of electronic medical records never envisioned that the technology might actually decrease the quality of patient care. Instead, they saw a world where medical errors would drop because charts could be easily accessed and read. They also hoped that electronic records would result in fewer duplicated tests and lower costs. Yet, the difficulty of using many of these systems means that, in some cases, it’s encroaching upon the quality of patient care. It’s a lesson for CIOs — the very technology they implement to solve a problem can actually make that problem worse if they don’t think carefully about the people using it.
See on blogs.wsj.com
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Mostashari says EHR incentives estimated to reach $20 billion by 2015 | Legal Transcription
There are no set appropriations for how much the federal government can spend on rewarding providers who adopt and use electronic health records under the Medicare and Medicaid meaningful use EHR incentive program, according to National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, M.D.
“Whoever qualifies, gets paid; there’s no hard cap,” said Mostashari, who gave a keynote at the Annual Policy Summit for the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) on Wednesday.
Mostashari said the federal government estimates it will pay out around $20 billion in incentives before the program shifts to a penalty in 2015, but there is no fixed budget set in the HITECH Act that mandated the program. The government recently announced it has paid out nearly $7 billion since the program began in 2011.
See on www.lawscribes.com
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Are meaningful use incentives worth the hassle?
It’s no secret that hospitals are unlikely to recover much of the money they spend on electronic health record (EHR) implementation through the meaningful use incentive program. But experts say hospitals need to watch out for the long-term costs associated with using EHRs. If technology initiatives are not planned effectively, these expenses may quickly swamp a hospital’s finances and have a much more lasting impact than the up-front money hospitals have to pay to get systems up and running.
Methodist Health System, a Texas group comprised of six hospitals and a network of ambulatory medical offices, has implemented EHRs throughout its system and is currently receiving incentive payments. But Pamela McNutt, the system’s senior vice president and CIO, said these payments only covered a fraction of the up-front implementation costs. When the total cost of ownership of the EHR system is added up, the meaningful use incentives may not actually be all that meaningful for the system’s bottom line.
See on searchhealthit.techtarget.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
Virginia moving on implementing health reform
Virginia has made progress in updating its computer system for verifying eligibility for Medicaid and has passed insurance regulations in preparation for implementing federal health care reform, according to a report by a nonprofit organization tracking states’ efforts.
But Virginia is behind in some key areas — it hasn’t created health insurance exchanges or marketplaces where people could buy affordable health insurance plans, and it may not be producing enough doctors to care for hundreds of thousands of newly insured people expected to be covered when reform is fully implemented.
The report, paid for by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a health care philanthropy, was done by researchers at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit policy research organization, “Virginia has made significant progress in health reform implementation, despite significant political opposition in and out of the state government,” conclude the report’s authors, Linda J. Blumberg, John Holahan and Vicki Chen, of the Urban Institute.
See on www2.timesdispatch.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
CMS Launches Electronic Quality Reporting Pilot For Hospitals – InformationWeek
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has inaugurated an electronic quality reporting pilot for hospitals participating in its Medicare electronic health record (EHR) incentive program.
According to an announcement on CMS’s QualityNet site, hospitals and critical access hospitals registered for the Medicare incentive program can begin testing their ability to send quality data directly from their EHRs to CMS. From Oct. 1 to Nov. 30, the last two months in which hospitals can attest to Meaningful Use and receive 2012 payments under the Medicare program, they can transmit this data to CMS on a “production basis” to meet the quality reporting criteria.
See on www.informationweek.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
Researchers Find EHR Training in Medical Schools To Be Lacking
Researchers Find EHR Training in Medical Schools To Be Lacking. Medical schools are not providing students with sufficient training on the use of electronic health record systems, according to a study published recently in the journal Teaching and Learning in Medicine, Modern Physician reports.
See on www.aspireemr.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
Better medicine, brought to you by big data
Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning, natural-language processing or some other technique, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that new types of data analysis are the key to helping them take their fields to the next level.
See on wesgbrooks.visibli.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
Finding a Consultant to Help a Physician’s Practice with EHR Selection, Implementation — www.physicianspractice.com
Here are some of the ways a consultant can help you get your EHR picked out and implemented seamlessly.
1. You and your office can meet with a single person, at a single time, and give them your list of wants, needs, concerns, and special considerations.
2. Your consultant can contact and sort through the 100s of EHR companies out there and determine a concise list that serves your needs and specialty most appropriately. Your consultant can even handle all of the necessary preliminary software demos and meetings single handedly.
3. Consultants will arrange for you to view and choose from a minimal list of companies/systems.
4. A consultant will stay by your side and negotiate pricing, warranty, tech support, and arrange implementation and assist you and your staff in getting everything started and converted.
5. Have I mentioned one point of contact instead of 2 to 3 per company you speak with?
6. Consultants provide assistance in implementation. They will hold your hand (or your nurse’s hand) until you are ready to take the training wheels off.
See on member.ubmmedica.com
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
AllAnalytics – Noreen Seebacher – Stroking the Data for Better Healthcare
Getting healthier could be as easy as turning on the TV… or a computer or smartphone. More and more healthcare providers are turning to telemedicine, a not-so new technology that’s been slowly transforming the way healthcare is delivered. Data collected from telehealth applications is used by an intelligent system, in real-time, to guide care and determine risk levels for patients.
See on www.allanalytics.com
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
Personal Health Records Could Spur Patients To Obtain Preventive Care
A study published in the Annals of Family Medicine finds that patients who use an interactive personal health record tool are more likely to obtain cancer screenings and certain other preventive services than patients without access to the PHR tool.
Researchers found that after 16 months:
* 25% of patients who used the interactive PHRs were up-to-date on their preventive care, up from less than 14% when the study began; and
* Less than 13% of patients who received standard care were up-to-date on their preventive care, up from 11% when the study began.
See on www.ihealthbeat.org
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
Joseph Rugg's Health Law Blog 