Meaningful Use
The Los Angeles Times printed an interesting article about the rising use of medical scribes - young, often pre-med students - who follow physicians on their rounds to input notes into the hospital's EMR system.
If you've got a lot of money and your reputation on the line in an effort to create a huge paradigm shift in how we as an industry deliver healthcare, you need to create an infrastructure and make available the resources to support this tsunami of social and technological change. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has carefully architected such an infrastructure.
Mount Kisco Medical Group in New York, with 230 physicians representing 40 specialties and serving 250,000 patients a year, is about to give its digital ways a makeover.
Even as the Office of the National Coordinator named Cincinnati and Detroit as its final two of 17 Beacon Communities on Sept. 2, it was already at work on measures designed to share what IT approaches work best for the Beacons with clinics and medical practices across the country.
Federal incentives for the meaningful use of EHRs has been a hot topic within the discipline and profession of chiropractic. A fairly recent article in Chiropractic Economics brought up some interesting issues.
As healthcare providers examine the final "meaningful use" regulations, perhaps too much focus is centered on IT system requirements and gap analysis.
The government will distribute nearly $17 million for patient-centered outcomes research that is supported by health information technology and data systems, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday.
Cincinnati and Detroit are the two final pilot communities selected under the new Beacon Community Program that is using health information technology to help tackle leading health problems in communities across the country. Between them they will receive $30 million in government money to help in their work.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan pegs the EHR market to double in growth in three years, from $1.3 billion in 2009 to an estimated $2.6 billion in 2012. The research firm noted that the HITECH Act's federal incentive programs and healthcare reform are two of the drivers for the uptick.
Weno Healthcare Inc. has applied to become a temporary electronic health record certification body and, if accepted, plans to shake up the competition.