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The Mississippi Division of Medicaid is being touted as the first Medicaid agency in the country to send and receive clinical data in real-time with a health system using an Epic electronic health record. The exchange, powered by data analytics company MedeAnalytics, was with the University of Mississippi Medical Center, in Jackson, the state's biggest Medicaid provider. "Giving doctors and nurses access to important information such as medications, diagnoses and allergies ensures that they can make the best care decisions for Medicaid patients," said John Showalter, MD, chief health information officer of UMMC, in a statement. [Also: Judy Faulkner says 'Good software is art'] MedeAnalytics first helped the Mississippi Division of Medicaid with the groundwork by creating an enterprise master patient index and single patient identifier in 2014. To do so, the company analyzed and de-duplicated records from 2.3 million Medicaid beneficiaries. The medical records had been collected over more than a decade. Today, the Medicaid division and UMMC can share Consolidated-Clinical Document Architecture patient summaries through UMMC's Epic EHR. MedeAnalytics expects it will receive about 3,500 clinical inquiries per day from UMMC. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] MedeAnalytics points to several benefits of real-time access, including emergency room care due to a more complete patient record, improved case management since Medicaid utilization and remaining benefits are able to be quickly accessed, and better care management since immunization records and alerts help ensure more up-to-date care. Twitter: @HealthITNews

Especially since participants in a recent survey indicated that they wasted time and money on measures that are not clinically relevant, some are starting to ask whether its worth it?

Medical practices spend an average of 785 hours per physician and $15.4 billion annually reporting quality measures to Medicare, Medicaid and private payers, according to a new report in Health Affairs. The study, led by researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College and funded by the Physicians Foundation, looked at the quality reporting efforts of primary care, cardiology, orthopedic and multi-specialty practices, polling 1000 of them (250 of each type), drawn at random from the membership rolls of the Medical Group Management Association. Their findings suggest that, while "much is to be gained from quality measurement, the current system is unnecessarily costly, and greater effort is needed to standardize measures and make them easier to report," researchers said. [Also: Slavitt, DeSalvo: Health IT has to work better for doctors] Practices reported spending 15.1 hours per week per physician wrangling quality measures -- 2.6 hours each week for physicians, with the rest of the work going to nurses or medical assistants. About 12 of those hours were spent logging data into medical records solely for quality reporting. Some 80 percent of practices said they spend more time managing quality measures than three years ago. Almost half said that's become a significant burden. But just 27 percent thought those measures necessarily correlated with quality care. Beyond the time invested, the dollars add up too. Weill Cornell researchers found that practices spent $40,069 per physician each year on quality reporting – totaling $15.4 billion annually. "The cost to physician practices of dealing with quality measures is high and rising," researchers said. "On top of the obscene waste of billions of dollars each year on quality measures, the most alarming thing about this study of MGMA member practices is that nearly three-fourths of the groups reported being measured on quality measures that are not clinically relevant," said Halee Fischer-Wright, MD, MGMA's president and CEO, in a statement. "The vast majority also stated current measures are useless for improving patient care," she added. "This study proves that the current top-down approach has failed. It serves no purpose to have over three thousand competing measures of quality across government and private initiatives." While care quality is essential and reporting standardization is critical, "if measures don't improve patient care, it’s an exercise in futility," said Fischer-Wright. "As the largest contributor to the problem, the federal government needs to get out of the business of dictating patient care through wasteful mandates and create simplified systems to support medical practices in improving quality across the country." As HIMSS16 in Las Vegas this past week, officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services emphasized that quality measures would continue to be a key component in CMS' reimbursement programs. [Also: Meaningful use will still be part of MIPS reimbursement, CMS says] Kate Goodrich, MD, director of CMS' Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, said new payment rules under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, or MACRA, would reimburse physicians based on a composite performance score factoring in quality measures (30 percent), resource use (30 percent), clinical practice improvement activities (15 percent) and meaningful use of information technology (25 percent). "Our intent is to have a single, unified program," she said, while acknowledging the need for flexibility and avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach: "We know physician practices are very different from one another." Earlier in the week, CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt said the agency has been listening more intently than ever to physician feedback, working with those on the front lines to understand their pain points. He cited actual quotes from physicians, including one who said, "Most of what I'm doing during the day is entering data into the EHR." While offering few policy specifics, Slavitt seemed to indicate that's a message that's resonating with CMS. Doctors are "not describing problems we don't know how to solve," he said. "Job one is to bridge the gulf between our public policy work and what's actually happening with patient care. That has to become an integral part of how we do things." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN

Movement hopes the analytics access will encourage entrepreneurs to use health data to improve patient safety and reduce preventable deaths.

(SPONSORED) In digital health, a lot can change in a year. This time last year, CMS had just announced Medicare reimbursement for telemedicine services.

Cyberattackers targeted Apple users over the weekend with the first known ransomware written specifically for Apple software, according to security firm Palo Alto Networks.     Ransomware is a fast-growing threat that encrypts data on infected machines and demands that users pay a ransom in digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, to receive an electronic key so they can retrieve their data. [Also: Hollywood Presbyterian gives in to hackers, pays ransom] The most high-profile ransomware attack happened just last month when attackers struck Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center and held its data hostage, effectively reverting the hospital back to a pre-digital state in which employees used paper records and fax machines. While most pieces of ransomware target Windows operating systems, in this new case hackers attacked Macs through a tainted copy of a program known as Transmission, which can transfer data via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network, Palo Alto Networks explained. Any Mac users that downloaded version 2.90 of Transmission, released on Friday, were infected with the ransomware. “On March 4, we detected that the Transmission BitTorrent client installer for OS X was infected with ransomware, just a few hours after installers were initially posted,” Palo Alto Networks said on its site. “We have named this Ransomware KeRanger.” Transmission responded by removing the malicious version of its software from its website and . on Sunday it released a version that it claims automatically removes the ransomware from infected Macs. Transmission users were advised to immediately install the new update, version 2.92, if they suspected they might be infected. KeRanger is programmed to stay quiet for three days after infecting a computer, then connect to the attacker's command and control servers to start encrypting files so they cannot be accessed, Palo Alto Networks added. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] “The malware then begins encrypting certain types of document and data files on the system,” the company said. “After completing the encryption process, KeRanger demands that victims pay one bitcoin (about $400) to a specific address to retrieve their files.” If paying the ransom seems far-fetched, hospital executives should know that’s exactly what Hollywood Presbyterian was forced to do when they settled for a $17,000 ransom. Twitter: @HealthITNews

San Francisco start-up Tiatros, a doctor-driven, patient-centered social network, has joined the IBM Watson Ecosystem, the companies announced March 2 at HIMSS16. Tiatros was designed to allow physicians, with the consent of patients, to create a social network around the patient, including all doctors involved in their treatment and their family members. The first user of the platform was the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco. UCSF hopes to leverage Watson to analyze personality insights for more personalized treatment, officials say. [Also: See photos from Day 3 of HIMSS16] Currently, UCSF is using Tiatros to address the behavioral health needs of young veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq to keep all parties connected to the patient – whether family or multiple providers – in the loop. "The real measure of how a patient is doing is the story they tell, not the boxes they check; that tells part of the story, not the whole story," said Kim Norman, MD, psychiatry professor, UCSF. "I think the online treasure trove of data in clinical practice is in the unstructured data and the story it tells. "I feel Watson gives you the tool to really analyze and extract that data, patient by patient and aggregate that data to really understand populations," he added. Data is entered in increments of 2,000 words through an essay format or using the most recent text messages from a patient. With the addition of Watson, the platform can analyze the information to accurately assess the personality traits, human values and needs of a patient. For veterans, this means Watson can determine patients with pre-imposed personality traits to be the most resilient in preventing posttraumatic stress disorders and those more likely to respond to an intervention, Norman said. Furthermore, interventions can be modified to match the traits. Additionally, Watson analytics can provide themes and allow providers to measure how patients are doing based on their stories. Twitter: @JessiefDavis This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

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U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs CIO LaVerne Council said last week that the VA needs to reconsider whether its proprietary Veterans Information Systems and Technology Architecture is the best electronic health record for its more than 1,200 healthcare sites. Council explained during testimony to U.S. House appropriators that changes in the VA's healthcare delivery plan, such as emphasis on mobility, security and women's health, as well as connections with private sector providers, are forcing the reconsideration of VistA. Specifically, Council said it was time to "take a step back" from the planned modernization of the VistA health record and announced VA plans to review whether it should continue upgrading VistA or turn to a commercial off-the-shelf product, much the way the Department of Defense elected to forego its in-house Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application, aka AHLTA, and is replacing it with a Cerner EHR. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] “We have not made up our minds about VistA,” Council said. When asked during a separate hearing last week by Montana Democrat Sen. Jon Tester why it’s taking so long to either fix or replace VistA, VA undersecretary David Shulkin, MD, explained that Council “has gone in with her private sector background and really challenged all of the assumptions that frankly have led to an underperforming part of the organization.” Council and Shulkin’s comments come after the Government Accountability Office published recommendations in Late February that both VA and DOD “develop and compare the estimated cost and schedule of their current and previous approaches to creating an interoperable electronic health record and, if applicable, provide a rationale for pursuing a more costly or time-consuming approach.” Twitter: @HealthITNews

Nominations period open for one more week as the federal agency looks to tackle concerns over a string of high-profile breaches.