Meaningful Use
With $23 billion already spent on incentivizing providers to adopt electronic health records, many in government and industry are wondering whether taxpayers and patients got what they paid for. The heart of the debate: The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, its meaningful use program and interoperable EHRs.
The folks at cloud-based EHR company athenahealth found cause to celebrate earlier this week when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid posted the list of EHR products providers used to attest to meaningful use.
The American Hospital Association has called upon the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator to quickly finalize rules regarding the expansion of choice for certified electronic health records.
Republican Texas Representative Michael Burgess, MD, vice-chair of the subcommittee on health within the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had not always been convinced of the benefits of health IT. But Hurricane Katrina changed his mind. Today, Burgess is a champion.
Ralph Johnson figured once would be enough. Having passed one EHR Incentive Program audit, he assumed his small health system had proven its meaningful use merit to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Then he got another email.
No matter what your job, there are certain phrases -- whether said by bosses, colleagues or clients -- that are just plain unwelcome: words that foretell frustration and added workload at best, panic and red-alert crisis response at worst. For hospital chief information officers, there's no shortage of these ominous sentences.
Even as healthcare providers across the country are struggling to make their new, expensive technology work, a new survey shows providers are more frustrated with their purchases than ever.
Working on the patient portal portion of Stage 2 meaningful use? Officials at Mayo Clinic can offer some valuable insight into their own portal rollout -- challenges that have arisen, privacy concerns and how to do it right.
More than 30 billion dollars have been spent. And while it is reasonable that many HIT outcomes are still unfulfilled, the path forward seems murky. EHR adoption has surged, but much of what has been broken about health IT in the United States still remains, writes John Loonsk, MD. That's why he's urging a hard reboot.
There is ample evidence that barcode technology for medication has had a significant impact on patient safety. But while most U.S. hospitals have adopted barcode medication administration, experts say there's big room for improvement.