The proposed rule for meaningful use Stage 3 was announced on Friday, March 20, 2015, and is now available for comment by stakeholders. Here are five highlights of the Stage 3 proposed rule and what I see as three provider wins:
Highlights
2017 is now a Flex Year– Meaningful use Stage 3 was originally slated to begin in 2017 for providers that had completed Stage 2; now 2017 is a flex year. This means that providers who would have progressed from Stage 2 to Stage 3 in 2017 now have the option to stay in Stage 2 an additional year. Only providers who use an EHR certified to the 2015 ONC standards will be allowed to attest to Stage 3.
Every provider will be Meaningful Use Stage 3 in 2018 even if 2018 is the provider’s first reporting year – In order to simplify the meaningful use program, all providers will be in the same stage. This will allow group practices to focus on a single set of measures for all providers.
Meaningful Use Stage 3 is the final stage of meaningful use– However, CMS is clear that because it expects technology and care standards to evolve over time it will consider (and we expect) that there will be future rulemaking related to meaningful use Stage 3 somewhere down the line.
All providers will report for one calendar year – in an effort to continue to align meaningful use with other government reporting programs such as PQRS, all providers will report for a full year based on the calendar with one exception. Medicaid first year providers will still be allowed to report based on a 90-day period measurement period. In the past CMS has shortened measurement periods based on provider feedback and we expect that to be true about this year. This year (2015) was slated to be a full year for most providers, but we expect it to be scaled back to a quarterly measurement period because of the continued side effects of the poor implementation of Stage 2 last year. For 2017 and beyond, we expect the implementation will be smoother and we don’t foresee more flexibility on measurement periods beginning next year.
There are eight objectives and some objectives have more than one measure – the total number of measures that providers will be required to report is 16.
Wins for Providers in the Meaningful Use Stage 2 Proposed Rule
I see three wins for providers in the meaningful use Stage 3 Rule, including:
In the following conversation, Jim Lacy, CFO and general counsel of ZirMed, discusses the company’s mission, goals and growth; his passion for healthcare and serving those who work in it; ZirMed’s transition from a clearinghouse to a revenue cycle management, population health and predictive analytics firm; why privacy has become the biggest issue very few are seriously talking about; and the changing face of healthcare as a whole.
Tell me more about ZirMed, the brand, its solutions, and your mission for it.
Our core mission is to help healthcare providers, hospitals and health systems get paid. It sounds simple, but efficiently and effectively getting providers paid for their services and supporting their mission in an ever-evolving technological, regulatory, and clinical environment is incredibly complex.
ZirMed is uniquely positioned to deliver a comprehensive end-to-end platform of cloud-based financial and clinical performance management solutions. That means that at every point in the revenue cycle, we have solutions that support healthcare providers in collecting monies from payers and patients, and do it as quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible. Our solutions address the challenges of the current fee-for-service and consumer-driven payment systems, and also support fee-for-value reimbursement, broadly defined as population health management.
ZirMed’s solutions are logically oriented to address the revenue cycle needs of providers ranging from small physician practices and durable medical equipment providers to the largest hospitals and health systems. At the front end, we offer Patient Access solutions focused on registration and check-in to streamline pre-registration, estimate patient responsibility, accurately verify eligibility, and more.
Core to our mission of getting hospitals and health systems paid for services provided is our Charge Integrity solution. We use big-data and predictive analytics to identify and capture charges, resolve process inefficiencies, improve coding compliance, and ensure the complete integrity of all inpatient and outpatient billing.
Our claims and A/R management solutions include robust edits and rules aggregating claims across an entire system, and provide highly efficient claims and receivables workflows, reduce preventable denials, and deliver insights into financial performance for critical decision support.
With the ability to process vast amounts of data and provider metrics across an organization, our cost and utilization solutions benchmark provider performance, stratify risk, and support fee-for-value reimbursement programs.
Population health management has come to hold very different meanings across different organizations. Our population risk management solutions combine clinical and financial information, enabling insights into patient populations while identifying risk, analyzing discharges for readmission risks, and managing referrals across an integrated system.
And, of course, healthcare is always about the patients. We offer a comprehensive suite of Patient Engagement solutions including consumer-friendly billing and payment options and a patient portal offering online payment, statement management, and two-way messaging between the patient and provider.
What about you? What keeps your passion for this mission, and organization, alive? Tell me more about what excites you about your work and why you love what you do?
I love what I do, and couldn’t design a better job for myself than this one: I get to be a CFO, counsel and influence product design, all within the course of a normal day.
My roles are seemingly very different and one person holding them is rather non-traditional; however, there is logic to the fit. ZirMed develops financially focused software solutions in a highly regulated healthcare environment. We deal with billions of transactions and hundreds of billions of dollars annually with an extreme focus on privacy, security and compliancy. My background from the provider side of healthcare prior to joining ZirMed directly influences the types of solutions we build and how we deploy them to positively impact provider organizations.
Ric Sinclair, our VP of product, and his team excel at designing and delivering great software that’s beautiful, powerful, and easy to use. Their role is to take all this complexity and make it as simple and easy as possible for users and managers in client organizations. My role is to weave my experiences into the design of our products and support the role of the client in everything we build.
So I’m doing what I love and working with incredibly smart, talented people every day. That makes it easy to stay passionate and excited about my work and about ZirMed.
Deb Dahl, vice president of patient care and innovation at Banner Health, discusses her experiences managing the telehealth program for the health system. Banner Health is a nonprofit health system based in Phoenix operating more than 20 hospitals and specialized facilities. It is the second largest employer in Arizona, providing emergency care, hospital care, hospice, long-term care, outpatient surgery centers, labs, rehab services, pharmacies, and ambulatory clinics, which include Banner Arizona Medical Clinic and Banner Medical Group.
The health system is a long-time user of telehealth technology, which has had a profound positive impact on providing patient care and is seen as a major benefit to the organization.
Have you used telehealth services in your practice to provide care?
Yes, we have had a long standing relationship with Philips collaborating on telehealth programs, using a “technology, people and process” approach to healthcare. We started with a single facility in 2007, and our telehealth program now reaches more than 400 beds at 18 facilities in Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska with plans to cover our Fairbanks, Alaska, facility and Nevada site some time in 2015. Across these facilities we utilize telehealth in the intensive care unit, acute care, skilled nursing facility, and ambulatory space (patients at home). We use a command center approach, which allows a dedicated team of physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, pharmacists and social workers. We provide coverage to more than 400 ICU beds in five states, more than 200 medical/surgical patients, neuro and behavioral health ED coverage, 500 complex chronic members at home, as well as simple low acuity on demand home visits.
What’s it like? Is it all it’s cracked up to be?
Yes, we went live with our first 50 ICU beds in 2006. With our program growth, we’ve experienced great results: in 2013 our ICU results were among the top three in the U.S. Using APACHE as the actual to predictive model Banner saved more than 33,000 ICU days, 47,000 hospital days and 1,890 lives in 2013. We are expecting similar results for 2014.
As the excitement of the festivities continued to roil on in Chicago for the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, and as health systems leaders merged with colleagues and partners for what is health IT’s biggest event of the year, I was not among those in attendance. As the conference opened and buzz at the show began to swell, excitement for news and new developments flowed from nearly every available channel, I was back home, far from the excitement of the show or its announcements, developments and news makers.
As health system leaders and their technology partners discussed how their solutions could make care better, engage patients more effectively and lead to better outcomes, greater efficiencies and higher quality care, my wife and I were in the center of the care universe in the heart of our local hospital where I was helping her through the delivery of our second child. Though the process was relatively straight forward and was done very quickly, the experience made me realize several things about healthcare technology from the patient’s perspective.
The first thing is that no matter how important we claim the technology used in the care setting to be, it matters little to those receiving care. For those receiving care, they want and need a seamless process where they have immediate access, without a wall of technology between them, to their care providers whether that’s a nurse, physician or some other support personnel. Patients, at the point of care, don’t want to face the burdens of interacting with the technology their caregivers are concerned with, but we as patients want their full attention. If patients must break through a fourth wall of technology, as I’ve seen to be the case on more than one occasion, the care staff, and more importantly, the health system, has failed the patient.
Secondly, patient engagement is more than a portal or access to one. And while patient engagement means different things to different provider types – like ambulatory vs. in-patient –the patient is still at the heart of the care, not the technology. Those who believe that technology can solve the patient engagement ills are wrong, and likely are failing to truly engage patients because they believe the myth that it can. Perhaps meaningful use has bastardized the term “patient engagement,” but it’s a sad thing when the entirety of that conversation centers around some form of technology or device. The irony of an event like HIMSS, where most of health’s relevant vendors clamor to meet with health system leaders, is that the buzz is built to surround the movement of the patient. The patient is at the heart of care, not technology or some bolt-on software solution.
We, patients, have been at the heart of care since the existence of healthcare; technology is an infant at play here. Let’s not forget that.
The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) and Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) have released a new video to educate consumers on their rights to access their own health information, and to encourage consumers to take control of their health using smart devices and simple applications to request, view and store their personal health details.
Despite significant efforts from the healthcare industry to improve methods to securely communicate protected patient health data, many consumers remain unaware of their rights and options to view and manage their personal health information. Access to health details can benefit patients in multiple ways, from making it easier to remember health history when filling out forms at a new doctor’s office to helping to care for a family member in need of assistance.
The new NATE/MiHIN video, viewable at http://tinyurl.com/bluebuttonvideo, was created as a brief introduction for consumers and healthcare providers. The video seeks to:
Educate patients and doctors on patients’ rights and options to access their health information
Teach patients how to get a Direct secure email address, which is necessary for secure transmission of health details online
Encourage patients to talk with their doctors about accessing their information electronically
Educate patients on applications enabled with the Blue Button Electronic Health Record Retrieval System for health data
Encourage doctors to adopt Direct secure email solutions to share data with patients
“Using our smart devices with a Blue Button-enabled application enables any of us to receive and share our personal health records using the same secure methods used by doctors today,” said Aaron Seib, NATE CEO. “These Blue Button-enabled applications can help patients make sure their information is accurate, make it easier for you to share your information with all of your doctors, and generally have it available whenever and where ever you need it.”
Guest post by Alex Tate, digital marketing specialist, content strategist and a health IT consultant at CureMD.
Most conductors are sounding out the last call for passengers to climb aboard the ICD-10 train. Although the trains won’t reach full steam until Oct. 1, 2015, the test runs will commence shortly. You’re probably wondering why passengers have to sit through these test runs, right? This is because the journey will last for at least 10 years, so everyone needs to get accustomed to the environment of this locomotive.
Your practice is the train, you are its railroad engineer, the conductor is your practice manager, but who are the passengers? Surely not the patients; they don’t need to apply the codes, do they? The answer to both questions is no. The passengers are your medical billing software vendors, you clearinghouses, your payers, and most importantly – your billers and coders.
If you haven’t started inquiring if these stakeholders and their systems will be ready before time, you could suffer from huge reimbursement disruptions once claims become dependent on these new codes. However, you still have time to get your engines running, and here’s what you need to do:
Contact your medical billing vendor
The first passenger on your train, irrespective of the number of trolleys you’re carrying, is your practice management (PM) or medical billing software vendor. This is because you need to inquire if your billing software is ready for the new codes. If not, you’ll not be able to get your claims through because they’ll contain defunct codes.
Additionally, you must also inquire if the vendor has a clear mapping process for ICD-10 conversion. If upgrades cost extra, or if you’ll need more training, you should have that in mind beforehand.
Lastly, ask them when you’ll be able to begin internal and external testing using these new codes, and if they have any recommendations for streamlining the process.
Those who are familiar with the new Apple smartwatch will know that one of the big focal points for new technology is in healthcare. The “Health Kit” is already available, but now Apple is releasing its “Research Kit.” The information that is collected via their Apple watch Research Kit will be used by scientists and hospitals around the world to understand better a whole array of health issues, such as diabetes, breast cancer and asthma.
Here, The Smart Phone Company provides some insight into the Apple Watch and its development into the Research Kit.
The Key to Medical Developments
The main thing that scientists are lacking, to help them in the understanding of diseases, is numbers. To be able to see patterns and trends, it is useful to have much data to compare, and this is where the Apple watch Research Kit comes into play. By being able to measure a number of variables from people all over the world, scientists and researches can have the information that they need at their fingertips.
With the new Apple watch Research Kit, researchers will be able to design apps which, using existing Apple technology, allows them to gather data that previously was only available in the lab. It also gives Apple watch users the ability to check up on their own health and see correspondences between activity and diet, and their health.
Guest post by Deanne Kasim, IDC research director, payer health IT.
Part of the role of being a research director is to analyze current industry trends, developments and policies and help clients navigate these IT, market, economic and regulatory changes. A post-health reform environment has accelerated the rate of change in all these areas. I recently developed a discussion of the top 10 areas of change payers need to focus on for the next 12 to 18 months (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=HI253579). The following is a brief discussion of the top three predictions.
Payers need to develop greater understanding of who their consumers are and adopt more of an omni-channel approach for reaching and meaningfully engaging different population segments.
Consumers understand how to assess the concept of value in other areas of their lives, such as researching information to purchase a new car, a major appliance, or a house. But they do not have nearly as good of an understanding on the way health insurance works, how to necessarily use it, or how to define value in insurance benefits and care choices. Health reform has forever changed the business model of health insurance and placed consumers front and center in the equation. This increased emphasis on the consumer needed to happen a long time ago and now payers are challenged to radically change how they develop, market, and administer health insurance benefits accordingly. IT tools and applications are quickly evolving to better support the consumer’s purchase decisions and use of insurance benefits, and payers are continuing to realize the potential and importance of this developing product area.
According to IDC Health Insights’ 2014 Payer Survey, payers were split between increasing the 2014 budget for consumer engagement strategies (49 percent) and keeping the budget the same (51 percent). I fully anticipate these numbers will be higher in this year’s survey, as more payers commit additional resources to the development and support of thoughtful consumer engagement strategies, processes and IT applications.
As the industry moves from pay-for-volume to pay-for-value payers need to form more “win-win” relationships with providers and this requires leadership, trust and the IT applications and analytics to support this.
The longtime practice of paying for volume is changing rapidly to pay for value, and the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) continues to lead developments in pay for value methods, including a variety of value-based reimbursement (VBR) practices, pay-for-performance (P4P) and global or episodic payments. The establishment of patient centered medical home (PCMH) and accountable care organization (ACO) models, combined with the reduced reimbursement realities under the ACA, has incentivized more providers and payers to explore new, mutually beneficial reimbursement arrangements. Providers and payers will have an increasing need for analytics applications to help predict and monitor clinical quality outcomes and financial performance measures in order to make VBR arrangements work for all involved stakeholders. In addition, as payers continue to employ narrow networks as part of their public HIX business line strategy, VBR arrangements with the contracted providers can enhance the performance of both payers and participating providers.
Those who are familiar with the new Apple smartwatch will know that one of the big focal points for new technology is in healthcare. The “Health Kit” is already available, but now Apple is releasing its “Research Kit.” The information that is collected via their Apple watch Research Kit will be used by scientists and hospitals around the world to understand better a whole array of health issues, such as diabetes, breast cancer and asthma.