John Andrews
An idea can change a lot over eight years and while the intent of interoperability remains essentially the same, its application has split off in various directions since 2004, when the Bush administration called for establishment of electronic health records, universal connectivity between healthcare providers and named David Brailer, MD, as national health information technology coordinator.
Look up the term "bioinformatics" and the definition will most likely be a convoluted series of references to algorithms, databases, artificial intelligence, computation theory, discrete mathematics, signal processing, statistics and a half-dozen other terms for complicated concepts. In essence, it is difficult to explain because there are so many facets to it.
Like any good narrative, the story of revenue cycle management starts at the beginning. For a hospital or health system, that means the patient intake process.
It is the kind of grade that students are afraid to show their parents – the dreaded D-minus. Barely a notch above flunking, the grade is emblematic of poor performance.
True to its Greek prefix meaning “distance,” the telehealth concept has come a long way in serving as a legitimate platform for virtual patient care. New technologies, applications and approaches are facilitating the category’s growth as healthcare providers search for IT systems with the broadest capabilities.
When a server goes down in a typical office building, the disruption is annoying and frustrating for those affected. But in a healthcare environment, the consequences can literally mean life or death.
When it comes to ICD-10 preparedness, payers are well ahead of providers in the quest to be ready for the new coding format by the Oct. 1, 2013 deadline. That news probably doesn’t come as a shock to anyone involved in the process, but it shows that the claim-filing infrastructure should be ready on the receiving end, coding experts say.
Managing populations – whether an aggregation of patients or a physical community – is a burgeoning field in healthcare as a way to improve care while containing costs. Many of the IT initiatives currently underway are related to population health in one way or another: electronic health records, meaningful use, interoperability, accountable care organizations, disease state management, pay-for-performance and patient-centered medical home all have elements that relate to managing patients in groups.
When looking at the potential uses for a system under the BI umbrella, there seems to be virtually nothing they can’t do as they collect, massage and deliver data for clinical, financial, administrative and operational purposes as well as for payer negotiations.
While HHS and CMS have come forth with some answers to the myriad lingering questions about Health Insurance Exchanges, it doesn’t change the fact that Jan. 1, 2014 remains a tight start-up deadline for states to meet.