Government & Policy
As the HITECH grant era comes to a close, national coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, wants to change with the times.
KLAS spoke with more than 100 providers for the recently published ICD-10 consulting services report, in which providers revealed who they used for ICD-10 assessments/road maps, implementation/PMO resources, on-site training, eLearning and application testing. KLAS re-contacted several of these providers to ask how the delay will affect their strategy. Guess who is relieved, and who is frustrated.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a highly regarded teaching hospital in Boston, but in 2012, the hospital found out it had one of the highest rates of readmissions among Medicare patients in the country. That meant federal fines of more than $1 million -- and a lot of soul searching for the staff, says Dr. Julius Yang, the head of quality for the hospital.
mHealth is a moving target and at the center of much debate. A key long-awaited report, issued April 3, appears to show the regulatory arms are united in their views of how mHealth should be regulated. But, should they be front-running mHealth regulation at all?
A new unit by HL7 and AIRA aims to create a national forum to target and solve challenges facing immunization-related healthcare interoperability projects.
The news that someone slipped a provision into the Sustainable Growth Rate patch legislation that will once again delay the transition to ICD-10 is disappointing, and symptomatic of the seemingly unreliable relationship that exists between providers, technology vendors and the government.
Industry observers and insiders alike were a bit surprised that the American Medical Association did not appear overjoyed with the prospect of ICD-10 being pushed back. But, the organization had its reasons.
Perhaps if the Senate had voted down the doc pay patch, regrouped, come back with another stab at permanent SGR repeal, someone would have noticed Section 212 saying that HHS cannot mandate ICD-10 as the standard code set before Oct. 1, 2014, in effect delaying the deadline by another year.
The U.S. Senate voted to pass the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014, which both pushes back the compliance deadline for ICD-10 and preserves the pay rate for doctors treating Medicare patients. Before those officially take hold, however, President Barack Obama has to sign the bill into law.
The American Health Information Management Association, the organization made up of professionals who manage healthcare information, is urging controls on the copy-and-paste functionality in electronic health record systems.