Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)
Mergers and acquisitions can be hazardous to a company's health, industry experts often warn. In the realm of health IT, this caveat has proved no exception.
We love the prospect of a new year ahead - 365 new days. It's just a calendar, of course, a tool for ordering days, setting meetings, making appointments and remembering birthdays. But as we move from the last day of one year to the first day of the next, our Outlook and Google calendars seem so much more than a way to schedule yet more tasks, more appointments, more projects and more deadlines.
No one would have guessed how far and how fast the federal incentive program for the adoption of EHRs would grow. Funding was mandated in 2009 under the HITECH ACT, with an estimated total expenditure anticipated at $20 billion. That payout has already reached $9.2B in the program's second year of a five-year program.
There are many elements of business intelligence in play within the healthcare IT continuum, but without a specific focus, the initiative is stuck in neutral. In fact, that is where many healthcare providers find themselves with their BI programs, system specialists say - wondering how to proceed and in which direction to move.
As the National Football League playoffs kick-off this month, there will be no shortage of excitement on the gridiron. There will also be one big difference taking place behind the scenes: The NFL will make the switch from paper to electronic health records.
Free the data! Empower the patient! Break down those walls! Collaborate! Innovate!
Sixty-nine percent of U.S. primary care physicians reported using electronic medical records in 2012 - up from 46 percent in 2009, according to findings from the 2012 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey.
Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record (EHR) incentive payments are estimated to have reached $9.245 billion to 177,100 physicians and hospitals through November since the program's inception and are anticipated to reach $10 billion by the end of the year (Healthcare IT News went to press before the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) posted final figures in late December).
Hospitals can have hundreds of IT systems. Vendors have built proprietary databases. Not everyone follows the same standards. Health systems fear sharing data with competitors. Policymakers have not focused on health information exchange or EHR usability.
Alisa Ray, the first executive director of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), has been newly named as the organization's CEO.