Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)

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How EHRs Tied Up Physician Time in 2015

Troy Parks | AMA Wire | December 11, 2015

As the year draws to a close, we’re taking a look at five of the topics that struck a special chord with the medical community throughout 2015. Burdensome regulations and technology have led physicians to spend considerable time struggling with their electronic health records (EHR). Fortunately, policymakers and health IT developers are starting to take note...

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How Hospitals, Nursing Homes Keep Lethal ‘Superbug’ Outbreaks Secret

Deborah J. Nelson, David Rohde, Benjamin Lesser and Ryan McNeill | Reuters Investigates | December 22, 2016

The outbreak started in January 2014. That’s when a resident of the Casa Maria nursing home here was diagnosed with Clostridium difficile, a highly contagious and potentially deadly “superbug” that plagues hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities. By the end of February, six more Casa Maria residents were suffering from the infection, characterized by fever, abdominal cramps and violent diarrhea...

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Humetrix Calls for Burgess Interoperability Bill to Add Provider/Patient EHR Exchange

As a developer of several mobile personal health record applications, Humetrix supports Congressman Michael C. Burgess, MD, aim to accelerate electronic health record interoperability as expressed in his draft Health IT bill. We emphasize the need to facilitate health information exchange between providers and their patients, so that patients or their caregivers connect and exchange their personal health information with different providers as a key complement to efforts to improve health information exchange between provider systems.

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ICD-10 Two Months In: Consultants Give an Inside Look at How the Transition Has Impacted the Industry

Rajiv Leventhal | Healthcare Informatics | December 8, 2015

Leading up to the healthcare industry’s transition to the ICD-10 coding set on Oct. 1, 2015, there seemed to be a collective feeling of uncertainty on the part of providers—particularly physician practices that frequently expressed doubt about their readiness for the shift. What’s more, numerous pieces of legislation were introduced into Congress, several of which advocated a “grace period” where healthcare providers’ ICD-10-based claims submitted to Medicare and Medicaid would not be denied due to coding errors. This led to providers becoming even more leery if the transition would indeed occur on the set date, given that it was delayed three times previously...

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If No One's To Blame For Healthcare.gov Glitches, Then Maybe Everyone Is

Jaikumar Vijayan | Computerworld | October 24, 2013

After listening to over three hours of testimony in Congress from some of the contractors behind the Obamacare Healthcare.gov site, one thing has become abundantly clear: No vendor is responsible for the problems that have plagued the health exchange since its launch nearly a month ago. Read More »

Increasing Health IT, EHR Investment Runs Up Practice Costs

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | August 10, 2016

New data from MGMA shows that increasing health IT and EHR investments are running up major practice costs. Health IT and EHR investments are costing physician-owned multispecialty practices thousands of dollars per physician, according to a new report from the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). The 2016 MGMA Cost and Revenue Report shows that health technologies such as EHRs ran physician practices up to $32,500 per physician in 2015...

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Insurance Policies Are Canceled In New Hurdle For Obamacare

Alex Nussbaum | SF Gate | October 29, 2013

The Obamacare rollout is leading to the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of health insurance plans nationwide, contradicting President Barack Obama’s repeated pledge that people who like their coverage can keep it. Read More »

Is The 1.5+ Trillion Dollar HITECH Act a Failure?

Hopefully, the public statements made by President Obama and Vice President Biden will lead to a public debate over the monumental problems that the HITECH Act and proprietary EHR vendors have caused the American people. While the press continues to report the figure of $35 billion as the cost of implementing EHRs, that figure does not tell the entire story. Perhaps the next step is to provide accountability and transparency. That would start with firm numbers regarding the real costs of EHR implementations forced on an unprepared healthcare system by the HITECH Act.

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JAMA: Target Wasteful Spending, Not Care

Kaitlyn Dmyterko | Cardiovascular Business | March 15, 2012

While striving to provide the most innovative and valuable care to patients is the overarching goal of healthcare, the costs associated with this care are astronomical. Several strategies have been implemented into practice to curb these high expenditures, yet current healthcare costs are nearly 18 percent of the gross domestic product. Donald M. Berwick, MD, and Andrew D. Read More »

Keeping Everyone in the Know: New CMS ADT Rule

On March 9, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued the Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule aimed at enhancing interoperability and increasing patient access to health information. This Final Rule contains a new Condition of Participation (CoP) that requires all hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and Critical Access Hospitals to electronically share (via an electronic health record [EHR] or another electronic administrative system) event notifications (also referred as e-notifications) with other providers across the continuum of care. These event notifications should occur whenever patients have an emergency department (ED) or inpatient admission, discharges, or transfers (also known as ADTs) in community hospitals.

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Latest Data on Medicare & Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs

The latest numbers have been posted on the 'open data' HealthIT.Gov  web site about the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) Electronic Health Records (EHR) Incentive Program. The 'open data' Health IT Dashboard maintained by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) provides an overview of key performance measures, facts, figures, graphs, maps, and data tables that enable real-time monitoring of the status and impact related to federal health IT programs and the modernization of the U.S. health care system. Read More »

Looking Back At A 2014: Thermidor For Health Care Reform?

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | December 29, 2014

As money drains out of health care reform, there are indications that the impetus for change is receding as well...

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Making Medicare Data Useful

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | April 11, 2014

Medicare’s release of physician reimbursement data is “unprecedented data” at work, as U.S. CTO Todd Park wrote. But what will researchers, and ultimately seniors and taxpayers, be able to learn from it?

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Markle Foundation Releases Blue Button Video To Show Promise And Potential Of Consumers Access To Their Own Health Information

Press Release | Markle Foundation | September 11, 2012

To help consumers, providers, insurers and other health data holders see how providing the ability for people to download their health records can improve health and health care, the Markle Foundation today released a new video showing the power of blue button technology. Read More »

Meaningful Use Payouts Top $16.5 Billion

Marla Durben Hirsch | FierceEMR | November 11, 2013

Participation in the Meaningful Use incentive program continues to increase, with more than 425,000 active registrations of eligible professionals and eligible hospitals. Overall, 325,000 unique providers have been paid incentives representing more than $16.5 billion in payouts, according to an article in Government Health IT. Read More »