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Is Hospital-Physician Integration Sustainable?
Reprinted courtesy of MCOL.
Perspectives on a Selected Key Topic |Â Â Â Â April 2011/May 2011Â Â Â Â |Â Â Volume Three Issue Two
Will a material number of hospitals and their core medical […]
Tire Kickers Need Not Apply: 8 First Impressions of the Medicare ACO Rule
On March 31, CMS released the long-awaited “Medicare Shared Savings Program: Accountable Care Organizations” document (ACO Rule). Read the details here (strong suggestion: unless you’re working on your PhD in ACOs, start with the fact sheets).
There are many surprises. Here are eight first impressions on this 429 page tome:
The bar has been set high…very high. Tire kickers need not apply.
Don’t expect to see many or any small ACOs.
Patients will be confused by ACOs.
Concerns over maintaining competition and avoiding antitrust are […]
The 6th Thing to Watch in the Medicare ACO Regulations
Health care lobbyists and advocates are bracing for six pages of the health care reform law to explode into more than 1,000 pages of federal regulations when the Department of Health and Human Services releases its long-delayed accountable care organization rules this week. Politico
What should you be looking for as you snuggle by the fireplace this weekend reading the draft ACOÂ regs?
Rob Lazerow writes a helpful article listing 5 Things to Watch in the Medicare Shared Savings Program Proposed Rule. […]
Electronic Health Information Exchange — Way More Complicated Than Getting Money from an ATM
“If banks can exchange funds electronically through the ATM system, why can’t my doctor and hospital exchange information electronically?”
Keith Boone’s concise article “A Doctor is Not a Bank” explains why this conclusion about healthcare interoperability is overly-simplistic.
…and Keith’s article reminded me of an even deeper explanation presented in the National Academies’ Frontiers of Engineering series — Why Health Information Technology Doesn’t Work, by Elmer Bernstam and Todd Johnson. The table below summarizes the differences between health data and banking data.
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Top 20 iPhone Medical Apps: No Connection to EHRs…Yet
iMedicalApps recently published its list of Top 20 Free iPhone Medical Apps for Healthcare Professionals.
What struck me about the list is that the state-of-the-art is stand alone applications — I didn’t see any that had any connection to an EHR (electronic health record). Here’s the top 5 to give you a flavor of what’s on the list:
Medscape
Micromedex
New England Journal of Medicine
Epocrates
Free Medical Calculators
I expect that this list will begin to look very different in coming years as EHRs continue to […]
Doctors Love iPads. What Does it Mean? What Does it Mean?
After attending the largest annual health IT conference of the year — HIMSS 11 – John Moore reported that “nearly every EHR vendor has an iPad App for the EHR [electronic health record], or will be releasing such this year.”
Doctors love iPads…not surprising? But, how might you explain this?
There are at least two different possibilities:
Coincidence Theory
Conspiracy Theory
The Coincidence Theory
So doctors want to access EHR software through the iPad…what’s the big deal?
Apple has built a great new hardware platform with the iPad. […]
Is Economic Credentialing A Tool for Primary Care to Lead ACOs?
Is economic credentialing — the use of economic factors such as loyalty and utilization rates in the physician credentialing process — a potential tool for primary care physicians to lead ACOs?  and reestablish the vitality of primary care in American health care?
Keith Wright and Gregory Drutchas’ incisive article Economic Credentialing: A Prescription To Secure Shared Savings Under Accountable Care provides useful history and context about economic credentialing:
For many years, the use of economic factors by hospitals in making medical staff credentialing decisions […]
Getting DIRECTly to the Point: The Role of the Direct Project in Fast-Tracking Health IT Interoperability
By Rich Elmore and Arien Malec. Rich Elmore is the Direct Project Communication Workgroup leader and Vice President, Strategic Initiatives at Allscripts. Arien Malec is ONC’s Coordinator, Direct Project and Coordinator, S&I Framework.
A patient’s health records are no longer confined to a doctor’s office, shelved inside a dusty file cabinet. With the advent of the Nationwide Health Information Network, a framework of standards, services and policies that allow health practitioners to securely exchange health data, medical records digitized to be easily […]
Complimentary Webinar — An Impending Marriage: Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Care Management Software
Webinar Title: An Impending Marriage: Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Care Management Software
The presentation will be geared at practicing clinical case managers in health plans, hospitals, disease management companies, and similar organizations:
Describe market forces driving integration of EHRs and care management software.Â
Review care management software survey data and stimulus funding for EHR adoption.Â
Describe a 3 stage framework for the evolution of EHRs and care management software.Â
Characterize benefits to patients and impacts on care manager responsibilities.
The event is sponsored by HealthSciences Institute […]
Comments to ONC: PCAST HIT Report Becomes a Political Piñata
The PCAST Report on Health IT has become a political piñata.Â
Early Feedback on PCASTÂ
Like many of my colleagues, I was taken aback by the release of the Report in early December 2010 — I didn’t know quite what to make of it. Response in the first week of release was:Â
Limited. The first commentaries were primarily by technical and/or clinical bloggers. The mainstream HIT world had remarkably little initial reaction to the Report.Â
Respectful of the imprimatur of “The President’s” Report and noting some of the big names associated with the […]