Meaningful Use

After nearly 20 years as a CIO, I've learned that even with the best people, best planning and appropriate budgets, large, complex projects encounter issues imposed by external factors that cannot be predicted during initial project scheduling.

What I find stifling is the pace at which meaningful use is proceeding. When you put an entire industry under the MU pressure cooker, the need to meet federal mandates overwhelms anything else.

In the Boston marketplace, Partners Healthcare is is replacing 30 years of self developed software with Epic. Boston Medical Center is replacing Eclipsys (Allscripts) with Epic.

There has been some buzz lately about how interoperability is a non-issue. I beg to differ. With increasing pressure from federal initiatives like Meaningful Use Stage 2, there is growing need for information exchange across the industry.

Every now and then a string of words will get put together, and peoples ears perk up, and you realize that you've created a new meme. That happened to me at the HIMSS Standards and Interoperability panel presentation.

The business model of most hospital and independent laboratories will be challenged by Meaningful Use Stage 2 (MU2). Each laboratory will need to think beyond its traditional role of a simple outreach and revenue center. MU2 raises the bar for lab data and clinical laboratories must play a significant role in coordinated care and decision support. Further, MU2 stands to change the nature of EHR-LAB connectivity in the U.S., with much tighter integration being required. Many laboratories may find that they lack the skill set and tools for LOINC, and that their LIS is not up to the task. As a result, laboratories will need start working immediately to take a much more active role in leading, defining, and participating in coordination EHR efforts within their community.

Atlantic Health System is leading the way in connecting healthcare providers with one another and with patients to help improve care coordination and patient engagement. Increasing levels of clinical connectivity in parallel with improved financial connectivity are driving better care and better financial outcomes. Read Atlantic Health’s story to learn about the incremental steps taken to establish the Jersey Health Connect HIO and about revenue cycle process improvements to improve financial performance via a relationship with RelayHealth.

Anyone who understands the importance of continuity of care knows that health information exchange is essential. How are we supposed to cut waste and duplication from the healthcare system and truly focus on patient welfare if doctor B has no idea what tests doctor A conducted, or what the results were?

As hospitals adopt and expand mobile computing strategies, power systems are critical to ensuring caregivers access the information they need, shift after shift, where it matters most – at the point of care. The marketplace is filled with competing claims about which factors matter most. To help hospital decision makers evaluate their options, here are seven questions to ask in evaluating mobile computing workstations, primarily focused on power systems.

EHRs were projected to reduce the need for transcription. However, with slower than anticipated adoption of EHRs by providers coupled with concerns about quality and fear of inaccurate documentation and over-billing due to inappropriate copy/paste and template use, there is still a demand for transcription technology and services. A skilled medical transcriptionist can be the economical choice when faced with passing time-consuming tasks on to the most expensive person in the documentation workflow – the physician – and can serve as the extra pair of eyes to validate structured and encoded data intended for consumption by the EHR.