Healthcare & Technology

Back to the drawing board on meaningful use

Link: Healthcare IT News

After considerable discussion, the committee for EHR meaningful use has been asked to develop a new set of criteria by July 16th. Ultimately, "CMS will be the final word on meaningful use and how it applies to incentives..."

This is interesting news since the workgroup had provided its recommendations and its criteria on the same day. It would be interesting to learn "what was missing" from the initial set of criteria.

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To stay current on the HITECH Act and its quickly changing regulatory scheme visit the HITECH Survival Guide website and/or sign up for our free monthly compliance newsletter. Also, check out our FREE EHR Checklist.

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HITECH : HIPAA : CFR Regs

A future release of the HIPAA Survival Guide(HSG) will make the full regulatory text of the pertinent CFR sections available online. This will allow users to "drill down" into the regulatory text itself from the summary and commentary provided by the HSG.

The ability to review the regulatory text in its entirety, section by section, will improve the ability of primary care providers (and other interested parties) to use the online version as a reference tool.

The entire contents of the guide are available online here: http://www.hipaasurvivalguide.com/

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Looking for a best of breed HIPAA Compliance Tracking System?

To stay current on the HITECH Act and its quickly changing regulatory scheme visit the HITECH Survival Guide website and/or sign up for our free monthly compliance newsletter. Also, check out our FREE EHR Checklist.

If you need tools that will help with your compliance initiatives then check out the HSG Store.

 

ONC Website: Health IT Documents

Link: Health IT - Meaningful Use Matrix

Thanks to Josh Seidman and his blog post for pointing me to this matrix. A PDF containing a matrix for "meaningful use" objectives to address Health Outcomes Policy Priorities and Care Goals was published yesterday.

The matrix is easy to understand with columns for health outcomes, policy priorities, care goals. Objectives and measures are identified for each year, beginning 2011 and through 2015. The matrix can be downloaded from the link above.

I find the matrix to be useful not only from a health objective and policy priority standpoint, but it directly links these policies to patient care goals and states not only the objectives to achieve these priority care goals, but also how to measure them.

OK, maybe it's the Type A personality coming out.... but.... It makes me think of the quote from long ago...(author unknown) "You can't manage what you can't measure." Priorities need goals that are clearly stated and that can be measured before success is proclaimed.

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Looking for a best of breed HIPAA Compliance Tracking System?

To stay current on the HITECH Act and its quickly changing regulatory scheme visit the HITECH Survival Guide website and/or sign up for our free monthly compliance newsletter. Also, check out our FREE EHR Checklist.

If you need tools that will help with your compliance initiatives then check out the HSG Store.

Criteria for EHR "meaningful use"

Link: Officials outline criteria for meaningful use | Healthcare IT News

ONC Co-chairs Paul Tang, MD, Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Farzad Mostashari, New York City Health Department outlined the criteria for 2011 objectives and measures including:

• Capturing data in coded format;
• Documenting progress note for each encounter (outpatient only);
• Using CPOE for all order types (using e-prescribing and drug and allergy checks;
• Managing populations (generating list of patients by specific conditions and sending patient reminders);
• Engaging patients and their families in their health (providing access to personal health information, educational resources and encounters of clinical summaries);
• Improving care coordination (exchanging clinical info among providers and performing medication reconciliation);
• Improving Population and Public Health (submitting electronic data to immunization registries, electronic labs to public health agencies, and electronic syndrome surveillance data to public health agencies); and
• Complying with HIPAA Rules and state laws, and with fair data sharing practices set forth in the National Privacy and Security Framework.

If you are looking for more information about the HITECH Act and HIPAA go to http://hipaasurvivalguide.com/hitech-act.html and download The HITECH Act: HIPAA Survival Guide, a freely accessible document that I co-authored with my husband who is a Privacy Attorney.

In addition, the HIT Policy Committee will accept public"open comments" on their draft of "meaningful use" criteria until June 26th. Click here to provide your comments and feedback.

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Looking for a best of breed HIPAA Compliance Tracking System?

To stay current on the HITECH Act and its quickly changing regulatory scheme visit the HITECH Survival Guide website and/or sign up for our free monthly compliance newsletter. Also, check out our FREE EHR Checklist.

If you need tools that will help with your compliance initiatives then check out the HSG Store.

 

HITECH Act: HIPAA Survival Guide

I recently launched a website that has The HIPAA Survival Guide (HSG) viewable online. The HSG is a concise overview of the HIPAA Regulations in light of the new HITECH Act (part of President Obama's recent economic stimulus package.) I thought I'd pass it on in hopes it might be useful to some of you.

The entire contents of the guide are available online here:
http://www.hipaasurvivalguide.com/

The HITECH Act summary page is available here:
http://hipaasurvivalguide.com/hitech-act.html

or, you can download a .pdf file of the guide here:
http://www.hipaasurvivalguide.com/hipaa-survival-guide.html

If you find it useful, please feel free to pass it on to others, especially primary care providers that may be struggling to make sense of the new regulations.

 

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Looking for a best of breed HIPAA Compliance Tracking System?

To stay current on the HITECH Act and its quickly changing regulatory scheme visit the HITECH Survival Guide website and/or sign up for our free monthly compliance newsletter. Also, check out our FREE EHR Checklist.

If you need tools that will help with your compliance initiatives then check out the HSG Store.

 

Who has a shared EHR?

Link: A shared electronic health record in Australia, a report from the Medical Journal of Australia, June 2009

This publication presents the case of an electronic health exchange in Australia that has been sharing clinical data with an electronic health record (EHR) since 2005. The exchange contains a registration system, a clinical database and a communications system and uses HL7 as the standard for interoperability between providers and facilities.

As of April, 2008, there are 239 Practitioners, 2 public hospitals, 3 private hospitals, 11 allied health and community based providers and 1108 registered patients on the system.

The original trials that provided support for implementation of this electronic health exchange occurred between 2003 and 2005 and were funded by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care.

Trials demonstrated that patients with chronic and complex conditions can benefit from a multidisciplinary, multisector, team-based approach to the planning and provision of their care. The trial resulted in an average reduction of 26% in inpatient costs for intervention patients. Another key outcome from the trial was the understanding that an electronic health record system was required to facilitate the flow of information between care team members, as existing paper-based systems did not work.

Based on the quote above, I see a few interesting points. There are obviously more data points that can be accessed from document (PDF) contained in the link above.

• Chronic/Complex conditions can benefit from patient records to multidisciplinary access.
• Inpatient costs can be reduced for these conditions.
• Education is required for providers to understand use of EHR/EMRs.

The journal reports ...

Implementing an electronic health record system is incredibly difficult. It involves deploying an information system, managing patients and providers, dealing with the “cultural” issues of exchanging information across specialties, and introducing changes to long-established processes across the health sector.

However, these difficulties do not outweigh the significant benefits derived from electronic tools, which provide essential infrastructure to support the delivery of high-quality health care and, in particular, multidisciplinary care team management of complex patients.

This announcement raises many questions in my mind, such as.... How was Australia able to implement regional EHR/health exchanges in such a short time period (2005-08)? What implementation barriers did they overcome, and how? I think these are interesting questions to ponder...

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Looking for a best of breed HIPAA Compliance Tracking System?

To stay current on the HITECH Act and its quickly changing regulatory scheme visit the HITECH Survival Guide website and/or sign up for our free monthly compliance newsletter. Also, check out our FREE EHR Checklist.

If you need tools that will help with your compliance initiatives then check out the HSG Store.

 

HIT "Meaningful Use" Defined?

Link: Meaningful Use by June 16th

According to a post by Chilmark Research, Michael Fitzmaurice of AHRQ announced at an mHealth event in Washington DC, that he expects "meaningful use" of electronic health records to be defined by June 16, 2009.

This is a long-awaited definition for certification criteria of EHR/EMRs.

 

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Looking for a best of breed HIPAA Compliance Tracking System?

To stay current on the HITECH Act and its quickly changing regulatory scheme visit the HITECH Survival Guide website and/or sign up for our free monthly compliance newsletter. Also, check out our FREE EHR Checklist.

If you need tools that will help with your compliance initiatives then check out the HSG Store.