HITInsight Blog Archives

MIPS impacts how doctors get paid. Are you ready?

Submitted by david.macfarlane on Wed, 11/30/2016 - 13:44

The April 2015 signing by President Obama of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) effectively changed the healthcare game for individual clinicians working in physician practices. The MACRA legislation repeals the existing Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) reimbursement formula and replaces it with a new Quality Payment Program (QPP) with two tracks: The Advanced Alternative Payment Models (APMs) and the default Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). A new Medsphere resource takes a closer look at MIPS, which will subsume existing EHR incentive programs.

Categories: 
Outpatient Care, Meaningful Use

A new political era, but no reason to retreat from behavioral health IT benefits

Submitted by D'Arcy Gue on Tue, 11/15/2016 - 12:35

It’s the season of post-campaign predictions. This week, most healthcare IT fortune tellers and sages are taking a shot at predicting what Trump will do with healthcare in general and healthcare IT specifically.

The (sort of) verdict?

Categories: 
Behavioral Health

Is information blocking finally on its last leg?

Submitted by D'Arcy Gue on Wed, 11/09/2016 - 11:00

Healthcare industry market analysts, technology gurus and IT reporters sometimes like to envision a powerfully capable future in which software architectures are open, small application developers are thriving, and healthcare IT solutions from numerous sources create a confluence of patient data that will advance healthcare quality.

A survey organized by the California Health Care Foundation and Health 2.0 suggests we may be far from that ideal.

Categories: 
Interoperability

How can we measure health system success without including mental health care?

Submitted by Irv Lichtenwald on Tue, 11/01/2016 - 15:13

If community hospitals are a general barometer of health in the surrounding area, the emergency room is the canary in the coal mine. Viral outbreaks, increases in violence, loss of health insurance from local layoffs—all are social ills that make their presence known first in the ER.

Based on recent ER studies, the U.S. is on the cusp of a full-blown mental health crisis.

Categories: 
Security, Behavioral Health

Urgency, responsibility, not devices, will improve patient engagement

Submitted by Irv Lichtenwald on Tue, 10/11/2016 - 11:06

We will get to a point in the not-too-distant future where EHRs are a great deal more functional and user friendly, where APIs link most if not all healthcare IT platforms and clinical devices, where personal wearable technology enables remote monitoring of patient condition.

These are largely technical challenges with some policy mixed in that can be solved through improved technology and targeted incentives. In the meantime, as technology progresses, American healthcare faces some more intransigent challenges that technology can help with but will not solve.

Are you maximizing EHR value by minimizing costs?

Submitted by D'Arcy Gue on Wed, 09/28/2016 - 13:30

Most of the time, discussions about behavioral health EHR costs focus almost exclusively on the actual outlay for the system, implementation and ongoing maintenance. Maybe hardware is also included when the behavioral health hospital in question doesn’t have the requisite foundation.

Categories: 
Behavioral Health

Yes, you can get ROI from a good behavioral health EHR, even without Meaningful Use

Submitted by D'Arcy Gue on Tue, 09/20/2016 - 21:02

No, there is no Meaningful Use for behavioral health hospitals, and yes, some mental health clinicians remain skeptical about the proposed value of electronic health records (EHR).

And yet a steadily increasing number of behavioral health facilities nationwide have adopted an EHR to improve patient care and organization performance. According to a recent Behavioral Healthcare survey, most are satisfied with the decision to make an EHR part of their daily routine.

Categories: 
Revenue Cycle Management, Behavioral Health

VistA retains top spot in most recent Medscape EHR survey

Submitted by D'Arcy Gue on Wed, 09/07/2016 - 11:18

Back in 2014, when the respected online medical publication Medscape last asked physicians how they felt about their EHRs, the overall winner was the VA’s Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), the core patient record component of the broader VistA system. Two years later, the results are the same.

HIMSS Cybersecurity Survey: Medical identity theft remains number one concern

Submitted by D'Arcy Gue on Tue, 08/30/2016 - 15:25

Most healthcare cybersecurity stories over the last year or so have focused on ransomware, the frightening new weapon in the hacker arsenal. But the results from the recent 2016 HIMSS Cybersecurity Survey suggest that medical identity theft remains both more lucrative than ransomware for hackers and the primary concern of healthcare IT leaders.

Categories: 
Security

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