Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)

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Apixio Illuminates The Pain of Recording Patient Risk Factors (Part 1)

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPPA | October 27, 2016

Many of us strain against the bonds of tradition in our workplace, harboring a secret dream that the industry could start afresh, streamlined and free of hampering traditions. But history weighs on nearly every field, including my own (publishing) and the one I cover in this blog (health care). Applying technology in such a field often involves the legerdemain of extracting new value from the imperfect records and processes with deep roots. Along these lines, when Apixio aimed machine learning and data analytics at health care, they unveiled a business model based on measuring risk more accurately so that Medicare Advantage payments to health care payers and providers reflect their patient populations more appropriately...

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Front-End HealthCare.gov Problems May Be Masking Bigger Back-End Problems

Sam Baker | Nextgov | October 25, 2013

By now, pretty much everyone knows that HealthCare.gov, the main portal to access the law's new insurance exchanges, doesn't work. When the site first launched, hardly anyone could create an account to begin shopping for coverage. And though the registration problems have gotten better, enrollment is still an uphill climb. Read More »

JAMA Forum: Why Are Private Health Insurers Losing Money on Obamacare?

Uwe Reinhardt | News @ JAMA | August 25, 2016

The report last week that Aetna, one of the major US health insurance companies, would leave most of the health insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 follows similar accounts the media that Anthem,  Aetna, and other large private health insurers are contemplating withdrawing from the so-called ACA marketplace. The companies say the reason behind these actions is they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars on the business coming to them from these exchanges...

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Modernizing Medicine Unveils Population Health Platform and Apple Watch Application at Annual User Conference

Press Release | Modernizing Medicine | November 30, 2016

Specialty-specific health information technology company Modernizing Medicine, Inc. announced major technological advancements to its intuitive suite of products and services at the company’s third annual user conference, MOMENTUM. An enhancement to the company’s specialty-specific electronic health record (EHR) system, EMA, and Practice Management system, Analytics is designed to give physicians near real-time population health data to help support the transition to value-based healthcare...

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Officials Spent Just Two Weeks Testing HealthCare.gov Prior To Launching It

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | October 24, 2013

Contractors that helped develop the Obama Administration’s troubled online health insurance marketplace HealthCare.gov told lawmakers on Thursday they wish they’d had more time to test the site before launch but denied any ongoing problems with their portions of the site. Read More »

'Blue Button' Technology May Give You More Control Of Your Health Information

Bill Toland | Siox City Journal | June 28, 2013

Get a group of tech-savvy physicians and electronic medical records experts in a room, ask them about the way forward, and the subject of the Blue Button is sure to come up. Read More »

10 Steps to Achieving Interoperability

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | December 9, 2015

When nine organizations -- several of them health IT vendors -- urged Congress in a Dec. 7 letter to resist delaying Stage 3 of the Meaningful Use EHR Incentive Program, the plea came with an outline for strengthening interoperability. "What is clear to us is that current requirements and pace of the Meaningful Use program have taken away time and valuable resources from fixing our nation's interoperability problem, the organizations -- Apervita, athenahealth, Intel, National Alliance on Mental Illness, New Directions Technology Consulting, Oracle, United Spinal Association and Verizon -- wrote in their letter to Congressional leadership...

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2014 MU Incentive Program Off To A Relatively Slow Start

Diana Manos | Government HealthIT | April 9, 2014

As of the end of February, there were 458,137 total participants – up from 448,750 in January – from all versions of the EHR incentive program, according to Elizabeth Myers, head of policy and outreach at the Office of eHealth Standards and Services, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services at the Tuesday HIT Policy Committee meeting. 

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21st Century Cures and the Road Ahead

I’ve been writing fewer posts recently because the trajectory forward for healthcare and healthcare IT seems to be evolving very rapidly.   In just the past week, we’ve had: the American Hospital Association letter suggesting that 21,000 pages of regulations be rolled back including Meaningful Use Stage Three concepts and quality measurement in many care settings, the passage of the 21st Century Cures bill and its many IT related mandates, and the nomination of Tom Price for HHS Secretary  and Seema Verma for CMS administrator...

A New Pricing Model for Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS)

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) recent $5 billion-per-year commitment to modular Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) technologies has signaled a long-overdue paradigm shift in the way we think about Medicaid information systems. This shift is already beginning to revolutionize and improve a health care system that over 73 million people depend on every day. Currently, MMIS services is at least a $7 billion-per-year industry. As the influence of modular, cloud-based, and SaaS (Software as a Service) technologies continue to exert themselves on MMIS, this industry will mature and move into the 21st century. One exciting aspect of this maturation will be a new pricing model for MMIS services.

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AHIP Speakers: Soaring Drug Prices Reach Crisis Stage

Ryan Basen | MedPage Today | March 9, 2017

On the same day that President Trump met with Democratic leaders to discuss controlling prescription drug costs, physician advocates and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) debated and vented about drug costs at the America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) National Health Policy Conference. "The system is broken right now," Marilyn Tavenner, AHIP's CEO and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said Wednesday...

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AHRQ Announces Health IT Research Funding Opportunities

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | April 1, 2016

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) will be sponsoring research projects geared toward bettering health information technology, according to a public statement. Specifically, the agency seeks to support research for improving the safety of health IT to better inform policymakers at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Food and Drug Administration, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)...

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AMA Board Chair: HHS Should Address EHR Usability Issues Immediately

Staff Writer | American Medical Association | May 15, 2013

The government needs to act quickly to remedy the impaired usability of electronic health records (EHR) if the technology's touted benefits are to be realized, AMA Board of Trustees Chair Steven J. Stack, MD (left), told officials during a federal hearing last week. Read More »

AMA Immediate Past President Challenges Healthcare IT Leaders to Fix EHRs

Mark Hagland | Healthcare Informatics | August 11, 2016

Speaking both as a practicing emergency physician and as the immediate past president of the American Medical Association (AMA), Steven J. Stack, M.D., challenged the healthcare IT leaders in his audience on Thursday to do everything possible to encourage improvements in electronic health record (EHR) technology for the sake of frustrated physicians, when he delivered the opening keynote address at the Health IT Summit in Nashville, sponsored by the Institute for Health Technology Transformation (iHT2—a sister organization to Healthcare Informatics under the Vendome Group, LLC corporate umbrella) at the Sheraton Downtown Nashville, in Nashville, Tenn...

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AMA Says EHRs Create 'Appalling Catch-22' For Docs

Tom Sullivan | Government Health IT | May 3, 2013

As the healthcare industry moves to EHRs, the medical record has essentially been reduced to a tool for billing, compliance, and litigation that also has a sustained negative impact on doctors' productivity, according to Steven J. Stack, MD, chair of the American Medical Association’s board of trustees. Read More »