Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)
Members of the Health IT Policy Committee approved a set of recommendations Tuesday that will bring meaningful use Stage 3 requirements one step closer to federal approval and scale back the initial Stage 3 proposals by 33 percent.
Steven M. Schiff, MD, a physician and CMIO, writes about how technology has changed how he relates to his patients. Clinical information used to be the exclusive province of the select few, but that is no longer the case, and Schiff sees it as a change that is beneficial to both patient and doctor.
The largest retail clinic in the country will roll out the most popular commercial EMR system throughout all its clinics. MinuteClinic, a division of CVS Caremark will switch to the Epic electronic medical record system called EpicCare.
Stage 2 of the federal Electronic Health Records Incentive Program is underway for providers who first reached Stage 1 in 2011. Although there will not be any official statistics available for several months, anecdotal evidence suggests that this new phase is off to a slow start.
There's been a whole lot of capital invested in health information technology these past few years. And some people -- especially those who are in charge of spending more of it -- want to know whether it's money well spent.
The GAO recently took a swipe at the government's Meaningful Use EHR Incentive Program, saying it lacked strategy and called for action to establish a strategy in order to achieve its goals, especially those aimed at improving care.
With more than 50 percent of practices and 80 percent of hospitals having adopted electronic health records and attested for meaningful use by now, it's time to talk about next steps.
The Army is planning to upgrade its electronic medical record system to ensure soldiers wounded on the battlefield will have detailed permanent accounts of the scenario and treatment received.
Ohio State University's 263 clinics have achieved Stage 7 of HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model, which represents the top level of EMR use.
In his $3.9 trillion fiscal year 2015 budget proposal released Tuesday, President Obama asked for $1.8 billion to support health information technology incentive payments -- the same amount he requested last year. Actual spending for this category came to $1.07 billion in 2013.