HHS Awards Another $12 Million For EHR Support

Posted by AMS at 22 FEB 7:47 am

Critical access and rural hospitals in 41 states will get additional technical assistance with implementing electronic health records.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has awarded critical access hospitals (CAHs) and rural hospitals an additional $12 million to help with technical support as they transition to electronic health records (EHRs).

The funds, announced Tuesday by Dr. David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health IT, will be disbursed through ONC’s Regional Extension Center (REC) program, and will provide a variety of support services to 1,777 critical access and rural hospitals in 41 states and the nationwide Indian Country, headquartered in the District of Columbia.

As many of these healthcare delivery organizations face budget constraints, CAHs and rural hospitals with fewer than 50 beds will receive additional technical support as they select and implement EHR systems primarily within the outpatient setting.

According to Blumenthal, critical access and rural hospitals are a vital part of the nation’s healthcare system. He also said health IT can offer rural healthcare providers and patients resources and expertise that they can’t currently access in their communities.

“We recognize that the transition to electronic health records (EHRs) is a challenge and that rural facilities face even greater challenges to make the transition from paper to electronic records,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “This additional funding recognizes the need to address these challenges and represents another important milestone in our commitment to critical access and rural hospitals throughout the country as they transition to EHRs.”

As these health delivery organizations adopt and become meaningful users of certified health IT, the funds, provided under the Health Information Technology Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will help them qualify for EHR incentive payments from Medicare and Medicaid.

The Medicare and Medicaid EHR incentive programs provide payments to eligible professionals, hospitals, and CAHs that adopt and demonstrate meaningful use of certified EHR technology. Incentives totaling as much as $27 billion over 10 years could be expended under the program, which is administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

In addition, the HITECH Act provided $2 billion through ONC to support technical assistance, training, and demonstration projects to assist in the nation’s transition to EHRs.

Serving CAHs and rural hospitals is a priority for the REC program, which provides hands-on technical assistance, guidance, and information on best practices to support and accelerate healthcare providers’ efforts to become meaningful users of certified EHRs under the Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs.

The funding is in addition to the $20 million provided to RECs in September 2010 to provide technical assistance to CAHs and rural hospitals. This latest $12 million round of awards will result in a total of approximately $32 million of funding provided to the RECs to support CAH health IT adoption.

Source: www.informationweek.com

Sharing with You News from our CMS Colleagues

Posted by AMS at 15 FEB 7:48 am

National Provider Call on Registration for the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program for Eligible Professionals

Friday, February 18, 2011; 1:00-2:30pm EST

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) invites you to join us for a national provider call addressing how eligible professionals can register for the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program. Learn if you are eligible for the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program, how to register, and what other steps you must take to receive an incentive payment. CMS will also discuss switching between the Medicare and Medicaid programs, reassigning incentive payments, and how to get help. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session.

The target audience for this call is eligible professionals under the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program, including:

* Physicians (primarily doctors of medicine and doctors of osteopathy)
* Nurse practitioners
* Certified nurse-midwives
* Dentists
* Physician assistants who furnish services in a federally-qualified health center or rural health clinic that is led by a physician assistant.

To qualify for an incentive payment under the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program, an eligible professional must meet Medicaid patient volume criteria.

In order to receive the call-in information, you must register for the call. (Note that if you are planning to sit in with a group, only one person needs to register to receive the call-in information.)

Registration will close at 1pm EST on Thursday Feb. 17, or when available space has been filled; no exceptions will be made, so please register prior to this time.

To register for the call:

* Click here to access the registration website
* Fill in all required information and click “Register.”
* You will be taken to the “Thank you for registering” page and will receive a confirmation e-mail shortly thereafter. Please save this page, in the event that your server blocks the confirmation e-mail. (If you do not receive the confirmation e-mail, please check your spam/junk mail filter as it may have been directed there.)
* If assistance for hearing impaired services is needed, the request must be sent to medicare.ttt@palmettogba.com no later than three business days before the event.

Additional Details:

* Materials will be made available prior to the training. – Click here to access the materials
* Can’t attend? A transcript and audio recording of the call will be available approximately three weeks following the session – Click here to access the information

Visit the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs website at CMS.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms.com to keep up to date with the latest information.

Questions? Contact Us

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What Do Future MU Requirements Mean for mHealth?

Posted by AMS at 8 FEB 7:45 am

What are some of my favorite things?  “Raindrops on roses” and “whiskers on kittens” definitely make the list.   How about the task of combing over a large chunk of new Meaningful Use (MU) proposed requirements? … Not so much… though necessary if one wants to understand how the HIT and mHealth markets will develop.

Will MU grow the market for mHealth technologies?  Or, the other way around, will the adoption of mHealth technologies encourage physician compliance with MU?

While skeptics may note that no corner of the HIT Landscape can escape the ‘mHealth hype’ – in all seriousness, mHealth technologies represent an important toolset available to both physicians and hospitals alike as they strive to comply with Meaningful Use.  This toolset is especially useful in the hospital setting, where physicians’ compliance is absolutely critical to the hospital’s ability to earn ARRA funds (particularly in smaller hospitals that have a higher percentage of affiliated physicians).

And let’s not forget about those other stakeholders – smartphone-loving, proactive patients, who are not concerned with MU but with gaining access to and control over their own health data, on their own terms within a mobile device that is with them 24/7.

The Stage 2 & 3 Proposed Requirements:  A 10,000 Foot View

One thing I noticed while studying these new proposed requirements was that they have been significantly watered-down, as compared to when I first started following MU in 2009.  As a result we now see a ‘kinder and gentler’ path towards MU.  I won’t list out the details here – John Halamka and Robin Raiford from Allscripts have already posted very helpful summaries of how Stage 2&3 expand upon the Stage 1 final rule.

Overall, from a 10,000 foot view, the new requirements point to the following:

1.   More electronic health data capture will be required (no news here).

2.   Clinicians will be required to ‘do more’ with this data by using it in advanced clinical processes and by sharing it with other providers, an HIE, and Uncle Sam.

3.   There will be an increased emphasis on patient engagement which will involve PHRs, patient education, and stronger patient-physician partnerships.

More Data Capture

Luckily for providers, the Stage2&3 proposals have loosened inpatient and outpatient note capture requirements in an effort to get notes digitized by any means necessary.  Notes can be maintained in structured or unstructured forms (scanned-in handwritten paper notes, dictation, etc are all possibilities).   With these loosened requirements, physicians will not be driven by MU to document at the point-of-care on their mobile device.  Instead, they will have to weigh other benefits, such as the ability to face the patient while taking notes on their touch tablets.

When it comes to discrete data, the story is different. Some physicians have been capturing charge data on mobile devices for more than a decade, avoiding workflow disruption while making sure they got paid. With the current explosion of mobile devices in health care settings, along with improvements in usability, physicians are now poised to move beyond charge capture to capturing the discrete information required for MU (problem lists, demographics, vital signs, smoking status, quality metrics, eMAR data, etc).

Using the Data: Towards Advanced Clinical Processes

Capturing digital health data does no-one good unless it is put to use, and so the Stage 2&3 proposals all expand requirements for advanced clinical processes that use this data, such as: CPOE, drug-drug/drug-allergy checks, eRx, CDS (Alerts), formulary checks, medication reconciliation, and more.

While early clinician adopters are already performing eRx and formulary checks on mobile devices, we are still far away from mission critical clinical processes such as CPOE and CDS moving to mobile on a widespread scale.  (We still need to get the desktop versions going!).  Currently, few vendors are established in this space, though PatientKeeper has CDS alert functionality built into their platform and is introducing their CPOE App in 2011.

On the other hand, advanced clinical processes such as CPOE and CDS have huge roles to play at the point-of-care.  Imagine that while at the bedside, a physician could receive guidance without disrupting the physician/patient interaction – similar to how they now use Epocrates but with data that is much richer and personalized to the current interaction.

Sharing the Data

A health crisis knows no designated time frame, and the ability of physicians to grant access and share patient information with other physicians or with an HIE (at 1am, from their kid’s soccer game, or during hospital rounds), will become increasingly essential.  With MU requirements around provider-provider and provider-HIE data sharing, clinicians will increasingly demand access to other provider portals and HIEs via their mobile devices.  In fact, HIE vendor Axolotl will be releasing a touch tablet (iPad) app in 2011 for this very purpose.

Patient Engagement Requirements

There are also significant new requirements relating to the ‘Patient and Family Engagement’ MU goal.

These include patient reminders, patient preferences for communication channel, online secure patient-physician messaging, timely electronic access to clinical data, bidirectional electronic self-management tools, and more.

It is easy to see how these requirements can tie-in to the mHealth ecosystem.  For example:

* Patients may prefer to be sent reminders via text message.
* Patients may wish to communicate with their doctor through a secure mobile messaging app.
* Patients may also want to be able to access their clinical data and educational resources through an mPHR/mEHR.

But, wait, let’s back up: do patients actually care about their health data?  Making the leap that providing an mPHR/mEHR to the consumer would nudge engagement rates upwards (and costs downwards) is just that – a leap.  However, this is a topic for the next post…

Summary: MU and mHealth

It is easy to see how many of the evolving MU requirements around data capture, advanced clinical processes, data sharing and patient engagement have a tie-in to the mHealth ecosystem, and how the mobile device will play an increasing role in MU compliance. Hospitals worried about the compliance of their non-employed physicians would do well to look into the mHealth ecosystem for tools that will encourage these physicians to comply — even though deploying HIS-integrated Apps will entail the usual governance, implementation and security costs.

Source: www.chilmarkresearch.com

Jackson Hospital Benefits from Electronic Health Records

Posted by AMS at 1 FEB 7:50 am

Jackson Hospital, one of five hospitals in the state of Florida, is participating in a nationwide publicity campaign to help the public become aware of the benefits of Electronic Medical Records and Health Information Technology.

Jackson Hospital is joining the ranks of hospitals, physician practices and healthcare providers across the nation registering with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to demonstrate its intent as a “meaningful user” of electronic health records called for by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).  Meaningful use of health information technology is in the best interest of patients, healthcare providers, and the nation.

Electronic health records provide a number of advantages to patients, including access by doctors to their patients’ complete health picture, better care coordination and fewer repetitive tests as providers share information, and ultimately savings in time and money.  Organizations that implement an EMR also have fewer medical errors by ensuring that correct information is retrievable and legible.

Jackson Hospital has been using an electronic medical record since 2003 and will continue to evolve its technology to meet new standards created in the HITECH Act.  The hospital currently links computers internally and makes patient information available to its Medical Staff through a secured network.  Beth Medlock, Jackson Hospital’s Director of Information Technology says, “Electronic Medical Record systems provide enhanced communications between caregivers, assure confidentiality protections and patient record security, and provide immediate reporting of test results, such as X-ray and laboratory.”

Jackson Hospital is this area’s technology leader using computers to provide higher quality and safer care to patients by adopting Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and other forms of Health Information Technology (HIT), such as an automated medication dispensing system in the ER and Main Pharmacy, patient medication administration system used by Nursing Staff, a picture archiving computer system (PACS) for X-ray images, and others.  Adopting high technology is just another example of our commitment to “Growing a Healthier Community.”

Source: PanhandleParade.com