medical billing

See the following -

$375 Billion Wasted On Billing And Health Insurance-Related Paperwork Annually: Study

Press Release | Physicians for a National Health Program | January 12, 2015

Medical billing paperwork and insurance-related red tape cost the U.S. economy approximately $471 billion in 2012, 80 percent of which is waste due to the inefficiency of the nation’s complex, multi-payer way of financing care, a group of researchers say. The researchers – physicians and health policy researchers with ties to the University of California, San Francisco, the City University of New York School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical School – note that a simplified, single-payer system of financing health care similar to Canada’s or the U.S. Medicare program could result in savings of approximately $375 billion annually, or more than $1 trillion over three years.

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Bahmni, OpenMRS recognized as Digital Public Goods by Digital Public Goods Alliance

Press Release | Bahmni | April 14, 2021

Bahmni, an open source Electronic Medical Record (EMR) governed by the Bahmni Coalition, was added to the Digital Public Goods Alliance's DPG Registry. ThoughtWorks, a global software consultancy is part of the Bahmni Coalition's core governing committee and was instrumental in conceiving and building Bahmni during its early years. The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) and its registry promotes digital public goods in order to create a more equitable world. To become a digital public good, projects are required to meet the DPG Standard ensuring they truly encapsulate open-source principles. Bahmni is one of only 23 projects deemed digital public goods out of more than 500 nominations. The Hospital Information System (HIS) and EMR is a seamless integration of three critical systems: patient medical records, laboratory management and billing. Bahmni has been built on top of OpenMRS, OpenELIS, OpenERP and cm4Chee, an OSS Radiology PACS Server - to be a user-intuitive system customized for use in low-resource areas with limited bandwidth and infrastructure.

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Cloud-Based EHRs With Integrated Billing Solutions May Save Thousands Of Independent Physicians From Acquisition, Reveals Black Book RCM Study

Press Release | Black Book Rankings | September 3, 2013

Nearly ten percent of physician practices are acquiescing to takeover offers from hospitals and larger medical groups, while more autonomous doctors confront the fallout from owning outmoded billing systems and unworkable electronic health records. However, Black Book surveys detect a defiant tipping point from the majority of independent physicians recently shifting to replacement EHRs... Read More »

Crowdfunding for Healthcare

Elizabeth Rosenthal's searing article about medical billing, adapted from her forthcoming book An American Illness, is well worth a read.  Its topic of sophisticated medical billing/upcoding -- done by organizations ostensibly acting in the best interests of patients and often under the guise of a non-profit status -- is also worthy of a discussion itself.  This is not that discussion. What jumped out to me (and to many others, on Twitter and elsewhere) was the following indictment: "In other countries, when patients recover from a terrifying brain bleed — or, for that matter, when they battle cancer, or heal from a serious accident, or face down any other life-threatening health condition — they are allowed to spend their days focusing on getting better"...

Docs Flock To Cloud To Save Bottom Line

Diana Manos | Healthcare IT News | September 4, 2013

Cloud-based EHRs with integrated billing solutions favored to save independent practices from take-over Read More »

Electronic Health Records Increase Doctors’ Bureaucratic Burden

Press Release | Physicians for a National Health Program | October 23, 2014

The average U.S. doctor spends 16.6 percent of his or her working hours on non-patient-related paperwork, time that might otherwise be spent caring for patients. And the more time doctors spend on such bureaucratic tasks, the unhappier they are about having chosen medicine as a career.

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Electronic Health Records: Saving Or Undermining Medicare?

Robert N. Charette | IEEE.org | September 26, 2012

Back in 2005, then Health & Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt was enthusiastically pushing hospitals and individual physicians to embrace electronic health records. Not only would healthcare providers and their patients benefit, but the cost saving EHRs would create (estimated to be $600 billion a year) would be “a key part to saving Medicare.” Read More »

EMRs Were Designed For Billing And Not Optimized For Patient Care

Margalit Gur-Arie | HIT Consultant | June 3, 2013

EMRs were designed for billing, so let’s unleash that power, instead of trying to convert them into something they cannot be at this point in time. Read More »

Government Drops Big Data Bombshell On U.S. Hospital Industry

Dan Munro | Forbes | May 9, 2013

To be honest, I never thought we’d get much further than Steven Brill’s epic Time cover story – Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us. We had seen some of the data in bits and pieces over the years, and we knew that many Americans were driven to bankruptcy through medical expenses, but Steven gave us fresh insight into the personal devastation behind the sheer cost of care. Read More »

Healthcare Isn't A Free Market, It's A Giant Economic Scam

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | February 22, 2013

You hear stories about crazy medical bills, but what very few people realize is that the reality of hospital bills can often be orders of magnitude more crazy than what most people expect. [...] Stephen Brill has a very long, but absolutely gripping, detailed analysis of the insanity of medical billing for Time Magazine... Read More »

Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?

Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.

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JunoEMR

JunoEMR is a Cloud-based EMR solution developed from the open-source software OSCAR with a focus on stability, cloud hosting, 3rd party integrations, new User Interface improvements and many quality of life updates. JunoEMR is fully integrated with provincial Medical billing and Labs systems in Canada as well as PHR, patient engagement, eFaxing Telehealth systems and much more. Read More »

Mental Health Providers Want Patient Tracking, All-In-One EHRs

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | July 25, 2014

For the 33% of mental and behavioral health providers who are still entirely paper-based, integrated practice management and EHR software is at the top of the wish list, according to a new report from Software Advice...

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Open Source Health Collaborates with OpenEMR on Cloud-based Integrative Health Platform

Press Release | Medical Information Integration, LLC ("MI-Squared"), Open Source Health Inc. | December 11, 2014

Open Source Health Inc...is pleased to announce it has entered into an agreement with Medical Information Integration LLC...to add Open Source Health's technology for Integrative and Preventive medicine to their advanced openEMR platform making it the first of its kind globally. This will allow the thousands of clinics and practitioners serving millions of patients in over 200 countries to expand their practice from disease management to Integrative and Preventive Medicine.

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Open Source Software Is Transforming Healthcare

In the summer of 2022, the UK government and NHS England published its Open Source Policy, stating that open source technology is: Particularly suitable for use within the healthcare industry where, through active collaboration between IT suppliers and user/clinicians communities, solutions can be honed to maximise benefits to delivery of health and social care. The public statement by NHS England is just the latest development in a broader trend: The wholehearted embrace of open source software by the healthcare sector. And no wonder; open source presents myriad opportunities for this most complex of industries, with potential solutions across various sub-sectors. Yes, open source is now powering everything from medical wearables to healthcare human resource management.

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