05/22/2013
HHS has exceeded its goal of 50% of eligible physician offices and 80% of eligible hospitals using electronic health records by the end of 2013. HHS data released today show that as of the end of April, 55% of eligible physicians and about 80% of eligible hospitals have received meaningful use incentive payments. Wall Street Journal, HHS release. (3)
06/04/2013
A Journal of the American Health Information Management Association report finds slow progress toward ICD-10 implementation. In the fall of 2012, more than 50% of survey respondents were in early stages of ICD-10 implementation. Clinical Innovation & Technology et al. (2)
06/14/2013
Medical Group Management Association research shows the health care industry's readiness to meet the Oct. 1, 2014, compliance deadline for ICD-10 continues to lag. Only 4.8% of surveyed practices reported making significant progress in their ICD-10 readiness. Healthcare IT News, FierceHealthIT. (1)
06/13/2013
Medical groups are criticizing an HHS proposal to amend HIPAA rules that prevent states from reporting certain medical information to a federal gun-purchase background check database. The proposal follows an executive order on gun safety that President Obama signed in January. Wall Street Journal. (1)
06/12/2013
A survey by National Association of State Chief Information Officers and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society finds state CIOs are taking on various health IT-related roles, such as overseeing health information and insurance exchanges. InformationWeek. (1)
06/11/2013
Making changes in clinical workflow -- no matter how quick, easy, obvious and valuable the changes might seem -- is really tough when clinicians have more work than the time needed for it. A number of technologies can make health IT time-neutral (or better, time-saving) for clinicians. By Jonathan Handler (1)
06/10/2013
There likely will be some initial "glitches" when the health insurance exchange websites open for enrollment on Oct. 1, according to experts. Building the online marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act has proven to be a complex task as they need to communicate and interface with government databases, state Medicaid systems and insurers, officials say. Wall Street Journal. (1)
06/07/2013
A CMS official announced that about $14.6 billion in meaningful use incentive payments had been distributed to eligible hospitals and health care professionals as of the end of April. Another official has noted that small urban hospitals are lagging behind in attesting to meaningful use. Healthcare IT News, Clinical Innovation & Technology.
(1)
06/05/2013
Forty-three percent of surveyed physicians say they are using smartphones to reference drug data, while 39% say they are using smartphones to make clinical calculations and 31% say they are using smartphones to make prescribing decisions, according to a recent report by Kantar Media, a provider of media and marketing services. (1)
06/03/2013
A new study finds that Twitter is a popular and generally reliable source for sharing information about vaccinations. The study also finds that more than two-thirds of the tweets with content containing medical information were scientifically substantiated. Medical News Today. (1)
05/30/2013
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have posted entries on the White House Blog praising the effect of the Affordable Care Act and other federal initiatives on the health care industry. Park writes that the 2009 federal economic stimulus package was a catalyst for broader electronic health record adoption. FierceHealthIT, eWeek. (1)
05/29/2013
A pair of studies published this week examined how the use of electronic health record systems and their components influence physician behavior. One found that a deluge of inappropriate EHR alerts could cause providers to ignore true positive alerts, while another reported that being tech savvy did not necessarily predict whether a physician will use such systems. Medscape, InformationWeek. (1)
05/24/2013
A new study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research finds that while mobile health technologies have grown and become more complex over the past 10 years, little research has been done to test their effect on health outcomes. FierceMobileHealthcare. (1)
05/22/2013
The use of health information exchange and data warehousing has kept the medical records of more than two million patients of Moore Medical Center in Oklahoma safe after the health care facility was damaged during a massive tornado on Monday. Modern Healthcare. (1)
05/22/2013
As of March, 160,890 eligible professionals had received Medicare meaningful use incentive payments, 83,765 eligible professionals had received Medicaid meaningful use incentive payments and 3,858 eligible hospitals had received meaningful use incentive payments from Medicare, Medicaid or both programs, according to recent data from CMS. (1)