As healthcare providers work to adopt electronic health records and achieve Stage 2 meaningful-use standards, most Americans are confused and concerned about the transition from paper to digital, according to a survey by Xerox.
Xerox, which polled about 2,000 U.S. adults in its fourth annual EHR survey, found that only 29% of them had been told by their physicians that their medical records would be converted from paper to digital format. And although most of the respondents think EHRs will reduce healthcare costs (62%) and improve quality of healthcare service (73%), even more (83%) worry about digital issues including security. Nearly seven out of 10 do not want their medical records in a digital format.
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Alexander
Seventeen Senate Republicans are asking HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to again delay the looming implementation of more stringent criteria for the federal electronic health record incentive payment program. Their request follows a plea to providers from a leading EHR vendor to ask the government for more time.
Their call came in a letter Tuesday to Sebelius requesting an extension of the Stage 2 meaningful-use requirements by one year “for providers who need extra time to meet the new requirements. Providers who are ready to attest to Stage 2 in 2014 should be able to do so with current policy,” the senators said.
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The American College of Physicians is nervous about where HHS is headed with the criteria for meaningful use of electronic health records.
The organization wrote a letter to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology addressing “what has been released for Stage 2 and what we have been told to expect for Stage 3” in the federal EHR meaningful-use program.
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Faulkner
The star of the Epic Systems Corp. user's group meeting that got underway in Verona, Wis., Tuesday was the venue itself, the cavernous five-story, 11,400-seat Deep Space auditorium that is literally buried into a hillside and designed so the view across the rolling Wisconsin campus would be undisturbed.
If Epic gets any bigger, the structure was designed so a balcony could be added to push its seating capacity to 15,500, according to CEO Judith Faulkner.
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The Delaware Regional Extension Center is batting better than a thousand.
It is the first of the 62 health information technology extension centers funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to meet its target of helping 1,000 healthcare providers across the finishing line as “meaningful users” of electronic health-record systems under the federal EHR incentive payment program.
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The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has a nifty online tool to help leaders of hospitals and physician groups, and other eligible professionals keep track of the meaningful-use criteria they must meet to qualify for the upcoming Stage 2 of the electronic health-record incentive payment program.
For both hospitals and physicians and other eligible professionals, the site lists all the relevant core and menu objectives as well as the clinical quality measures that make up the Stage 2 criteria. It also enables a provider to select the objectives and clinical quality measures they intend to use and download copies of them and their descriptions in spreadsheet, PDF or XML formats.
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Some people protest with a picket sign, others with a bullhorn. For health information technology consultant Gary Dickinson, his mode of protest is the matrix.
“It's kind of my outgrowth of frustration for many months,” said Dickinson, the co-chairman of an electronic health record working group of Health Level Seven, a standards development organization.
Right now, he said, what the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is calling interoperability shouldn't be called that, at least not yet. “We need to acknowledge as we go forward that the real benchmark (on interoperability) is still ahead of us,” he said.
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Watch out for a French person talking about revolution.
“The patient is the revolutionary in healthcare these days,” said Dr. Bettina Experton, a French-born oncologist turned U.S. citizen and health IT entrepreneur. “That is why I think Blue Button is revolutionary.”
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