Mostashari
Health information technology leaders have a lot on their plates today and more to come—implementing systems to match the federal IT incentive payment program upgrades, satisfying auditors roaming the land, meeting privacy constraints and preparing for the switch to a huge set of updated diagnostic and procedural codes.
Read more »
A scheduled House committee hearing on the Food and Drug Administration's progress toward implementing a federal law requiring it to develop a regulatory strategy for health information technology was postponed Thursday, as the government shutdown continued into its third day.
Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, was scheduled to testify before the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the Food and Drug Administration Safety Innovation Act.
Read more »
A Medicare test of accountable care in Wisconsin slowed cost growth last year for about 20,000 seniors. That's good news, of course, to economists and policymakers. But for hospitals, the news was not all good because most payers continue to reimburse on a fee-for-service basis rewarding more admissions and more volume of services.
An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that for hospitals that participate in Medicare accountable care programs, such as ThedaCare in Appleton, Wis., competing financial incentives can make their ACO efforts counterproductive.
Read more »
Wachter
At the sixth International Conference on Diagnostic Error in Medicine on Wednesday, Dr. Robert Wachter gave a quick history of patient safety and quality improvement but noted that activity to reduce diagnostic errors was noticeably absent from the movement's timeline.
“There's still not a lot of action promoting this agenda,” said Wachter, professor and associate chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. He made the remark after describing events that took place after the Institute of Medicine published “To Err is Human,” its report on medical errors, in 1999.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
Here's a sobering thought: Nearly 40% of all children in the U.S. are eligible for the Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides automatic healthcare coverage for the poor. That means 4 in 10 kids in the U.S. are growing up in poverty or near-poverty.
Here's another sobering thought. Not every kid who is eligible gets coverage through the entitlement program. Their parents must apply for CHIP/Medicaid and many don't.
Read more »
Declaring that the “move toward team-based care requires fresh thinking,” the American College of Physicians released a new policy paper that outlines professionalism, licensure, reimbursement and research principles for such teams to follow. The document appears unlikely to settle deep divisions between physicians and their team members on those matters.
Teams of physicians, nurses, physician assistants, clinical pharmacists, social workers and other health professionals require “a new way of thinking about clinical responsibilities and leadership, one that recognizes that different clinicians will assume principal responsibility for specific elements of a patient's care as the patient's needs dictate,” according to the authors, Robert Doherty, ACP senior vice president for government and public policy, and Ryan Crowley, ACP senior health policy analyst. The paper, “Principles Supporting Dynamic Clinical Care Teams,” was published Monday in theAnnals of Internal Medicine.
Read more »
Every day when a patient goes to the drug store, within the course of a few questions and a few key strokes, a clerk or pharmacist can match that patient to the right electronic prescription and insurance records in their computer system.
It's accomplished with probabilistic matching, relying on five key data elements—the patient's first and last names, date of birth, address and sex. The same basic technique is used throughout the country to match patient-care summaries and full electronic health records in queries by providers to health information exchanges.
The systems used today can, when properly implemented, “achieve extraordinarily high” rates of accurate matching, said Lee Stevens, policy director for the state health information exchange program within HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
Read more »
The potential blessings of smartphones and tablets carry with them the potential curse of health information insecurity, but there is no ducking the challenges of both, according to a multi-industry survey of IT leaders.
Nine out of 10 of the 1,200 IT professionals surveyed across eight industries, including healthcare, expect the growing use of personal mobile devices to have a major impact on their organizations, while 92% indicate they've already encountered challenges in their organizations due to the devices, according to new report, “Mobility at Work,” by technology seller CDW, of Vernon Hills, Ill.
Read more »
Clinton
The reform law got a boost Wednesday from former President Bill Clinton, who praised the law's benefits and urged supporters and detractors to work together on fixing its problems.
Clinton's speech is a needed boost for the White House less than a month before open enrollment begins, especially as the Obama administration is now focused on garnering support from Congress for a military strike against the Syrian government. <
Read more »
Clinton
The reform law got a boost Wednesday from former President Bill Clinton, who praised the law's benefits and urged supporters and detractors to work together on fixing its problems.
Clinton's speech is a needed boost for the White House less than a month before open enrollment begins, especially as the Obama administration is now focused on garnering support from Congress for a military strike against the Syrian government. <
Read more »
