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Family physician and medical blogger Kenny Lin wrote of the error he almost made several years ago when he prescribed medication for one of his patients using his EMR system. He clicked the wrong choice, but caught his mistake before the patient left the office. Lin's assessment: "electronic systems only change the nature of the medical errors that are made."
I was going to write about the Institute of Medicine holding its first meeting as the entity tapped by the ONC to study the safety of EMRs. Or is it EHRs? I read a couple of articles and EMR and EHR were interchangeable. Has the industry finally reached a point where they are interchangeable?
While healthcare entities are still trying to change the Stage 1 meaningful use criteria, the Health IT Policy Committee has begun fleshing out the Stage 2 criteria.
The 62 regional extension centers (RECs) provided feedback that enabled the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to announce the rollout of five new initiatives aimed at driving greater EHR adoption. They're great ideas, but shouldn't they have been in place when the RECs were first announced? In other words, shouldn't ONC have anticipated these needs?
Given that ICD-10 compliance day is still nearly three years from now, most of the chatter about a total industry-wide sum for new code sets has leaned toward projecting an overall cost. But there's a flip-side: the cost-savings that converting to ICD-10 will bring the healthcare realm – and to the tune of billions of dollars.
When providers mismanage the revenue cycle, the financial impact may seem relatively small on an individual claim, but when multiplied by hundreds of visits a week, the effect on the bottom line is the equivalent of death by a thousand paper cuts—slow, agonizing and certain. The good news is there is a remedy.
Surveys aside, the stories about physicians implementing EHRs as reported in local media are incredibly instructive in understanding what's happening out in the field with EHR adoption. I read about a family practice physician in a two-physician office in Mount Pleasant, Tex. His insights are quite interesting, and I encourage you to read the article.
Many independent physicians are partnering with their local hospitals to be able to tap into the hospital's EHR system with minimal cost. What obligations the independent physician offices must fulfill depends upon the agreements made or partnerships formed. Many physician offices aren't ready to enter into such partnerships that perhaps may include exclusive physician referral rights.
A mid-November survey of 191 members of the College of Health Information Management Executives (CHIME) reveals that hospital CIOs are less confident they will meet Stage 1 meaningful use criteria and therefore not qualify early for EHR federal stimulus funds.
The Washington & Idaho Regional Extension Center (WIREC) announced last week that it had reached a milestone of signing up its 1,000th primary care physician (PCP) to use its services to help them implement and adopt EHRs. WIREC noted that it is one of the first RECs (162 in all) to reach that milestone.