IHE-USA strives to “drive adoption of standards-based interoperability to improve patient care through innovation, standards profiling, testing, education and collaboration.” Part of this mission is achieved through the IHE North American (N.A.) Connectathon, which will take place January 9–14, 2012 in Chicago. Notably, IHE is reporting that: More than 100 leading health IT companies and research…

It is not too late to submit an exemption to the 2012 e-prescribing penalty. The deadline for requesting an exemption is November 1, 2011. For those of you who are not familiar with the e-Rx incentive program, it will impose a one percent reduction on all of your Medicare reimbursements in 2012, if you did…

Despite great hope that clinical decision support systems (CDSS) embedded in EHRs will lead to better outcomes, it has been difficult to demonstrate the effectiveness of CDSS on clinical outcomes. This week, an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine (Anne Holbrook, MD, PharmD, MSc, FRCPC, et al) tested an intervention which, “…included personally tailored electronic…

HIMSS defines Health Information Exchange (HIE) as “an electronic movement of health-related information among organizations utilizing nationally recognized standards and policies.” Organizations include hospitals, diagnostic facilities, and medical practices. Healthcare delivery is all about information exchange and could not take place without the ability to transmit referral requests, prescription renewals, lab reports, and hundreds of…

I just received an email invitation from CMS to an upcoming webinar on Tuesday, 10/25, from 1:00 – 2:30 pm. I’ve copied/pasted the details and Registration link below: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is holding a second webinar on clinical quality measures (CQMs) and their importance in attesting to meaningful use for the Medicare…

AmericanEHR Partners released two reports today (10/20/11) based on our extensive survey data from over 2,300 responses in collaboration with the American Academy of Allergy Asthma & Immunology, the American College of Physicians, the American Osteopathic Association of Medical Informatics, the Infectious Disease Society of America, and the Renal Physicians Association. One report (profiled in…

The AmericanEHR Partners team is proud to announce a new report from our extensive survey data of EHR users entitled, “The Correlation of Training Duration with EHR Usability and Satisfaction: Implications for Meaningful Use.” The report, released today (10/20/11), highlights physicians’ experiences with the usability of EHRs to achieve some Meaningful Use requirements. Based on…

The Center for Medicare & Medicaid announced a new program yesterday called the, “Innovator Advisor Program.” From the Innovation Center website: “In the months and years to come, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Innovation Center) will seek to introduce transformative models of care delivery across the nation that will meet the aim of…

Is a pattern emerging with regard to the push towards Meaningful Use of health information technology? In the effort to leverage HITECH to foster rapid change, are shortcuts being taken? What happened to the sequence of identifying objectives, exploring alternatives to achieving those objectives, selecting standards, testing those standards in pilots/demonstrations in practice, and ensuring…

Wondering how the EHR Incentive program is going? How many Eligible Professionals (EPs) and Eligible Hospitals (EHs) have registered? How much money has been distributed?  Is there a difference between Medicare & Medicaid? Well, thanks to CMS, you can see the statistics through September 2011. Click on this link to open a PDF slide set:…

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is seeking comment on a draft document titled “Technical Evaluation, Testing and Validation of the Usability of Electronic Health Records” (NISTIR 7804). The public comment period is from October 3 through November 10, 2011. NIST states: Usability is “the extent to which a product can be used…