Physicians believe electronic health records can improve patient outcomes but feel that EHR costs outweigh any financial benefits they might have, according to the fourth annual athenahealth Physician Sentiment Index.
The survey also found that doctors see receiving third-party payments as increasingly complex but are getting less frustrated with the process. Similarly, physicians doubt government involvement can have a positive impact on healthcare, “but the passion surrounding it seems to have lessened,” according to the survey.
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Mostashari
Federal health information technology policymakers plan to establish a voluntary program for the testing and certification of electronic health-record systems used by long-term care, post-acute care and behavioral health providers.
Congress, in drafting legislation creating the EHR incentive program under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that helped hospitals and office-based physicians buy tested and certified EHRs, did not include long-term care and behavioral health facilities, even though nearly a third of Medicare patients discharged from acute-care hospitals go to post-acute-care settings.
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There has been significant progress in getting health information technology systems to talk to one another, according to a new study on interoperability by HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
The study, “Hospital Electronic Health Information Exchange Grew Substantially in 2008-12,” was published in the August issue of the policy journal Health Affairs. The report was written by five ONC staffers, including the lead author, Michael Furukawa, director of the ONC's Office of Economic Analysis, Evaluate and Modeling, and contributor Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the ONC chief.
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The findings of a new study published this week in BMJ Quality & Safety show the first evidence that electronic health records can play a role in reducing hospital readmissions of high-risk heart failure patients.
The study evaluated more than 1,700 adult inpatients diagnosed with heart failure, myocardial infarction and pneumonia over a two-year period at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. With the use of software developed to assess the patients on a daily basis at highest risk, researchers were able reduce the readmission rate of those studied by 26%.
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Eight out of 10 eligible hospitals and 58% of eligible physicians and other medical professionals have received payments totaling $15.5 billion under the federal electronic health record incentive payment program, according to the latest CMS data.
Through June, 4,024 hospitals have shared nearly $9.2 billion dollars to adopt, implement, upgrade and/or meaningfully use certified EHRs under the Medicaid and Medicare EHR incentive payment programs created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
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The Obama administration is conducting targeted audits of hospitals to find possible upcoding of medical services related to use of electronic health records.
Don White, a spokesman for the HHS Office of the Inspector General, said the OIG is conducting audits of “specific institutions” on EHR-related overbilling.
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So far, members of a trade group of health information technology developers like some of what they see in a federal health IT safety initiative that focuses on quantifying any adverse impacts their software is having on patients. But these vendors are withholding final judgment until more plan details are unveiled.
On July 2, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS released its 50-page Health Information Technology Patient Safety Action and Surveillance Plan that creates an infrastructure to collect and analyze data about health IT-related patient safety events.
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Mostashari
CMS officials pushed back Wednesday on Republican suggestions that a pause is needed in the electronic health-record incentive program.
“A pause in the program would stall the progress that's been hard fought,” Dr. Farzad Mostashari, national coordinator for health information technology, said at a Wednesday hearing on the program by the Senate Finance Committee.
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Being a cardiologist in the 21st century means knowing that your Medicare claims are likely to get a lot of scrutiny. So cardiologists have to pay a lot more attention to documenting what they do in the electronic health record.
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The healthcare industry, with the federal government at the helm, is setting sail on a voyage into the unknown: whether and to what extent patients are suffering harm from the systems that providers have spent many billions of dollars buying, and the feds many billions in incentivizing.
“That's the part we don't know,” said Dr. Ron Wyatt, medical director, division of healthcare improvement at the Joint Commission. “We know that probably less than 10% of adverse events are reported. That's how big the water is.”
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The healthcare industry, with the federal government at the helm, is setting sail on a voyage into the unknown: whether and to what extent patients are suffering harm from the systems that providers have spent many billions of dollars buying, and the feds many billions in incentivizing.
“That's the part we don't know,” said Dr. Ron Wyatt, medical director, division of healthcare improvement at the Joint Commission. “We know that probably less than 10% of adverse events are reported. That's how big the water is.”
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