Financial/Revenue Cycle Management

Healthcare providers are taking telemedicine to new heights, with the market seeing growth of a whopping 237 percent within a five year period, according to a new Kalorama report.

Remember when doctors made house calls? It's probably safe not to expect the return of those days any time soon, but some healthcare stakeholders are saying the time has come for providers to take a more active role in their patients' healthcare.

Idaho State University will pay $400,000 to the U.S. Department of Health Human Services to settle alleged violations of the HIPAA Security Rule. The settlement comes after ISU's Pocatello Family Medicine Clinic disabled server firewall protections for a period of at least 10 months, resulting in the breach of electronic protected health information for some 17,500 patients.

The Beacon Communities proved that organizations can advocate changes to how healthcare is paid for by working with payers and providers, while improving quality and safety at the same time. "These were the pillars of the Beacon Community activities, and they taught us," National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD, said. "They showed what we needed to do."

More than half of all eligible providers nationwide have received federal incentive payments for demonstrating meaningful use of electronic health records, rates that have more than doubled since last year alone, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday.

Transparency is a touchy subject in healthcare. It's one of the last market strongholds desperately clutching to its principles of secrecy, and it won't go down without a fight. But many experts say this stands as one of many reasons the industry continues to drag its feet in the innovation arena.

Healthcare organizations will need to be more effective, cost efficient and productive in the future to not only survive, but also to maintain positive cash flows, according to Brian Fugere, COO of RemitDATA.

Members of Congress are lauding a bipartisan bill that limits funding for an integrated electronic health record system between VA and DoD and requires aggressive progress updates from both agencies, which have, in recent months, come under fire for the dilatory pace at which they're moving forward with the iEHR.

Larry Garber is a believer. The physician and medical director for informatics at Worcester, Mass.-based Reliant Medical Group has seen electronic health records make big, real life changes both financially and clinically, and now he's set out to spread the word.

Continuing the upward trajectory of EHR reimbursements flowing out into the healthcare industry, CMS said on Tuesday morning that the total paid as of March's end is more than $13.7 billion.