The new year is going to be important for physicians in meeting regulatory requirements and reporting deadlines. These deadlines will affect quality of care, adoption and usage of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). These deadlines relate to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and more importantly, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). January 1, 2014: CMS Meaningful Use Read more…
Healthcare
Healthcare IT Risk Assessment: 5 Steps
Healthcare IT systems are intertwined with operations, policies and processes along with a bunch of systems, application and data. Sometimes the systems are so complex that one breakdown can last for days and cost the organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost time and money. Therefore, it is imperative that healthcare organizations dependent on Read more…
Improving patient engagement through patient portals
Patient portals are one of the major requirements for Meaningful Use Stage 2 and beyond, and they are in big demand. From large scale practices to small and medium ones, everyone is using these portals to improve patient engagement and shared decision making. Even the physicians who are not offering patient portals are looking to offer Read more…
CMS extends deadlines for Meaningful Use Stage 2 and 3
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has extended the provider attestation deadlines for Meaningful Use Stage 2 and stage 3. Under the new timeline, Stage 2 will now be extended until 2016 while. Stage 3 will begin in 2017 for providers who would complete two years in Stage 2. According to Rob Tagalicod, Read more…
Data center outages costing healthcare industry big time
Without a shadow of doubt, technology has made our lives simpler in a way that we could not have imagined about two decades back. If someone back then had spoken of how we would be able to carry our emails with us all the time through smartphones, browse the entire world with just a few Read more…
Obamacare – Is it the right direction for Healthcare?
In the winter of 1854 when Lord Alfred Tennyson first wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” he described in his narrative an ensemble of people who follow their brigade as part of their patriotic duty; in fact, so immersed are these foot soldiers in their sense of civic obligation that they never question where Read more…
10 ways Health IT is transforming Healthcare in America
Transformation takes time, but with the use of IT the process can be made robust. Now let’s get to the 10 ways we believe Health IT is transforming the landscape of healthcare in America. Significantly lower costs: When it comes to technology one major achievement of healthcare IT is the automation process. The other important Read more…
EHR & Healthcare automation: Are patients better off?
Information Technology has completely revolutionized the way healthcare is being managed by providers nationwide. From a point where EMRs were just used to record patient vitals, the technology has expanded to include cross-platform information sharing, meaningful use of patient data, patient portals, electronic prescribing, electronic labs and many others. Where rising healthcare costs have been Read more…
ACOs Will BE Accountable for Care Quality?
The carrot-and-stick approach in the Medicare program, the Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), has become one of the most talked about new ideas in Obamacare. Providers are entitled to receive more payments if they keep their patients healthy. According to an estimate, nearly four million beneficiaries now belong to an ACO and along with the private Read more…
How Can Doctors Get Ready for ICD-10?
Most of the physicians, healthcare providers and hospitals are gearing up for the monumental change in medical codes which takes effect on October 1, 2014. The classification of disease codes collectively referred to as ICD-10, comprise of almost 70,000 codes. This is an increase of more than 500 percent from the current 13,000 ICD-9 codes, and Read more…