Meaningful Use
Following last week's call from Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, to pause the meaningful use program and determine whether "the bar is too low," a federal hearing Wednesday included testimony from providers and a tech vendor who recommended expanding the timeline because the next phase is overly-prescriptive and threatens to hinder hospitals.
A new MGMA compensation survey shows that CIOs and information systems directors received median pay increases of more than 7 percent since 2011, as demand for health IT services continue to rise.
Providers are increasingly using electronic health records, both to manage their patients' care and to provide more information to those patients, according to new data published Wednesday by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
As we reach the "tipping point" of electronic health record adoption, the Office of the National Coordinator has issued a mark for EHRs and other health IT products that's meant to serve as visual proof that they can offer functionality, interoperability and security.
Marc Probst, CIO of Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, Utah, discusses a partnership with Deloitte designed to provide clinical data insights to other organizations in the medical community.
The HITECH Act has had its desired effect so far, according to the latest annual report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which finds heartening adoption levels of health IT across the board, from small physician practices to academic medical centers, over the past three years.
Healthcare, which has always been based on the doctor-patient interaction, is nearing the end of Stage 1 meaningful use, and as the industry increases its reliance on electronic health records, it faces a new challenge. That conundrum, says Nick van Terheyden, MD, and CMIO at Nuance Communications, is how to reconcile the need for standardized structured data capture with the importance of narrative in patient-doctor interactions.
Hill Physicians Medical Group CEO Darryl Cardoza credits the group's successful ACO arrangements, improved efficiencies and the health information technology that supports it all for not only improving patient care, but also lowering costs. And, he's bullish on alignment.
SNOMED was so important to healthcare's switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 medical coding, ONC Chief Farzad Mostashari, MD says, that he was willing to support the one-year delay to achieve the necessary crosswalks. This system of nomenclature can lay the groundwork and foundation for much better, more granular clinical documentation, he said.
Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national coordinator for healthcare IT, asserted today there would be no extension of the deadline for switching from the ICD-9 medical coding system to ICD-10. The deadline for conversion would remain Oct. 1, 2014, Mostashari said in a keynote delivered this morning at the HIMSS Media ICD-10 Forum in National Harbor, Md.