Guest post Ruby Raley is director of healthcare solutions at Axway.
One little-discussed but widely recognized aim of the HITECH Act’s meaningful use Stage 2 requirements is to stem rising costs and improve outcomes by engaging the consumer to take control of their healthcare. But how is the consumer supposed to take control of anything when their health plan determines which clinicians and hospitals they can visit, and their doctor controls their health record?
That’s an issue the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recognized as they developed the incentives for the HITECH Act. To address it, they adopted the electronic health record (EHR), a tool that (1) helps clinicians and hospitals reap incentives and avoid penalties by proving they’ve achieved meaningful use, and (2) puts the certification burden on EHR vendors instead of clinicians and hospitals.
athenahealth released the results from its fourth annual Physician Sentiment Index (PSI), which each year checks the pulse of a national pool of physicians to see how they’re feeling about navigating various industry changes and challenges.
According to athena, the company leveraged the Epocrates’ physician user base to survey to 1,200 providers to identify information on physician awareness and opinions of healthcare and health IT.
As might be expected, the results of the survey include findings and some notable themes:
Doctors Who Go it Alone are Hurting the Most – Again, a trend we continue to see and as we might continue to expect as more corporate health system money gets pumped into the ambulatory market, independent doctors, who account for just more than half of the physicians surveyed, are feeling the most pressure when it comes to industry change and requirements.
Among the many misconceptions providers have about using a practice management software for their daily workflow, they believe that the software slows them down. A good PM software will never slow the doctor down and instead, will make their workflows efficient, save them time, remove the daily monotony of work and reduce the paper work.
The second misconception providers have about practice management software is that it makes them spend lesser amounts of time with their patients. While this may be true for those providers who still don’t know how to effectively use the software, it is entirely false because a practice management software actually allows providers to spend more time with their patients.
Milton Silva-Craig, president of TransUnion Healthcare, discusses his thoughts for the future of healthcare, payment reform, new patients and financial pressures in the reform era and changes he sees on the horizon.
How has the role of data analytics changed in the healthcare industry, especially in light of the ACA and reform?
It is no longer a nice tool to have at your disposal. It is a requirement. It is the foundation necessary to support the outcomes of reform. Moving forward, reimbursement will be tied directly to outcomes and performance. The only way to measure such performance will be through the use of data. It will be the insights gleamed from the data that will allow providers to be successful in managing the intersection of patient care and a healthy business.
Guest post by John Moynihan, healthcare segment manager, Global Industry Marketing, Siemens Enterprise Communications and Randy Roberts, vice president, mobility portfolio, Siemens Enterprise Communications.
Technology in business today can seem like a zero-sum game. When the employees win, they are able to do whatever it takes to be productive. But doing that tends to tie the hands of IT, keeping them from locking down devices and services well enough to make sure their information is secure. This situation is becoming more common in the medical industry, with clinicians and computing staff often at odds over convenience versus security. Doctors, traditionally reluctant to adopt new technology or take any risks with tried-and-true methods for caring for their patients, have taken to mobility as a duck to water.
Because access to patient information allows them to better do their jobs, doctors in particular are quickly adopting tablets and smartphones. And while they’re not ignorant of the security risks of these devices, particularly the potential for patient information to be lost or stolen, their focus is on caring for their patients. In fact, even if their business doesn’t provide or specifically allow for mobility, they are bringing their own devices into the office.
Using electronic health records to automate reporting of quality measures reduces reporting time required for one measure set alone by about 50 percent, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
According the a release issued by Kaiser Permanent, for the six measures studied in this paper, we were able to extract between 43 percent and 100 percent of the elements needed for the measures.
“With an increased focus on transparency in the healthcare industry, we are seeing significant growth in the number of public reporting initiatives, and automated quality reporting allows us to keep up with these initiatives without adding to high overhead costs.” said Jed Weissberg, MD, senior vice president of Hospitals, Quality and Care Delivery Excellence, Kaiser Permanente. “An added benefit of automated reporting of quality measures is that some data become available real-time, further enabling us to improve care in an expedited manner.”
Say it isn’t so: Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, is going the way of David Blumenthal and is exiting the position he has held for more than two years.
He announced today that will leave this fall, according to a letter by U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Mostashari has served as National Coordinator since April 2011. Mostashari served as deputy national coordinator prior to his current post.
“During this time of great accomplishment, Farzad has been an important advisor to me and many of us across the Department. His expertise, enthusiasm and commitment to innovation and health IT will surely be missed. In the short term, he will continue to serve in this role while a search is underway for a replacement,” Sebelius said in the letter.
Mostashari spent four years with ONC.
“During his tenure, ONC has been at the forefront of designing and implementing a number of initiatives to promote the adoption of health IT among health care providers,” Sebelius wrote in the memo. “Farzad has seen through the successful design and implementation of ONC’s HITECH programs, which provide health IT training and guidance to communities and providers; linked the meaningful use of electronic health records to population health goals; and laid a strong foundation for increasing the interoperability of health records — all while ensuring the ultimate focus remains on patients and their families.”
Guest post by Ken Perez, healthcare policy and IT consultant.
Don’t say we had no warning. In late February of this year, 30 of the 32 Pioneer ACOs sent a letter to CMS that expressed concern about the program’s quality benchmarks and requested reporting-based, as opposed to performance-based, payments for performance year 2013.
On July 16, CMS shared the results of the first year of the Pioneer ACO program, which were rather checkered. On the positive side, all 32 Pioneer ACOs successfully reported the required quality measures, and costs for the more than 669,000 Medicare beneficiaries in Pioneer ACOs grew by 0.3 percent in 2012 versus 0.8 percent for similar beneficiaries in the same year.
