Meaningful Use
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives is urging CMS to rethink the government's rulemaking proposals on accountable care organizations.
Allscripts and Boston-based Humedica have announced their collaboration on a next-generation cloud-based clinical informatics platform that will help physicians and hospitals succeed in the coming era of value-based reimbursement.
An advisory panel that is shaping measures for the next stage of meaningful use has suggested delaying Stage 2 by one year, until 2014, as an option to give vendors and healthcare providers more time to update and roll out more advanced technology.
Several years into the national interoperability initiative, it’s fair to wonder if the healthcare industry is making as much progress as expected when it started under the George W. Bush administration.
Farzad Mostashari, the newly appointed and fourth leader of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, is going to face some stiff challenges his predecessor David Blumenthal did not have to face.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ proposed regulations on accountable care organizations, released March 31, will be one of the first delivery-reform initiatives to be implemented under the Accountable Care Act and will be key to overhauling the U.S. healthcare system, said Donald Berwick, MD, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
With the continuing weak economy and the advent of health reform, bundled reimbursement and accountable care organizations expected to ratchet up the financial pressure on their businesses, physicians are increasingly looking to health systems as employers.
Meaningful use incentives, HIPAA and ICD-10 conversion are combining to create a high demand for healthcare IT professionals in the marketplace. Eric Marx, vice president of healthcare IT services for IT staffing and recruiting firm Modis, discusses what hospitals and other healthcare organizations are doing to find the right people for the right jobs.
Many vendors give short shrift to the usability of their electronic medical records, says Jiajie Zhang, who is devoting the next three-plus years to addressing this usability factor - something he believes has been a barrier to physician adoption.
The Health IT Standards Committee has begun exploring some of the functions that electronic health records should be capable of performing in Stage 2 of meaningful use, with providers using health information exchange to send patients their information to a personal health record (PHR) a prominent example.