The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released the January payment update to the EHR Incentive Program through January 2012. Here are some data from the EHR Incentive Payment Summary for January 2012. Medicare Data 22,937 Eligible Professionals (EP) received incentive payments $412,866,000 distributed Average per EP = $18,000 Top 4 Specialties: Family Medicine –…

Several news items surfaced yesterday (February 14, 2012) referencing comments made by acting CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner during the American Medical Association’s National Advocacy Conference. HealthIT News covered it here; Modern Healthcare here; and iHealthBeat here. Most of the commentary has been that CMS can only delay the implementation and that it is extremely unlikely…

Beginning on March 1, 2012, CMS will open an Appeals Portal for Eligible Professionals participating in the EHR Incentive program. (The portal for Eligible Hospitals is slated to be up by June 1, 2012.) Until such time as the Appeals Portal is up, the guidance available is here. According to this document, the types of…

During this five-minute video report by Deven McGraw, the issues of health data privacy, caring for adolescents, and what patients can do to help assure privacy of health information are discussed. Ms. McGraw is the director of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. The video is posted on iHealthBeat.

GE purchased MedPlexus in 2010 in order to provide a cloud-based EHR targeted at small practices. Now, less than two years later, GE has announced that it will no longer support Centricity Advance after June 30, 2012. Multiple postings on the web describe this change. Here’s the story from InformationWeek Healthcare. This decision was made,…

The American Medical Association (AMA) just released a new online program addressing health IT and workflow redesign. The topics covered, through 3 modules lasting less than 10 minutes each, include electronic prescribing, pre-visit planning, and point-of-care documentation. The program is nicely produced. It includes video/audio, transcripts of the content, and links to resources. This post…