By Julie Appleby – Medicare plans to test new ways to pay for prescription medications given in doctors’ offices and hospital outpatient centers — moves likely to win praise from some policy experts, but opposition from facilities and practitioners.
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By John Halamka MD – Every year I walk the HIMSS floor and speak at HIMSS events with the hope that I can distill the conference sensory overload into a few key themes. In the recent past, big data, interoperability, personalized medicine, population health, and wearables were buzzwords in every booth. This year, the buzzwords were replaced by one overarching concept – providers and vendors must innovate or die.
By Mike Sutter – Several different ‘flavors’ of telehealth have developed over the years, with varying degrees of popularity and adoption. Some hospitals have telehealth systems in an emergency room, allowing ER physicians to communicate directly with physicians at another site. Other hospitals have specialty physicians who leverage telehealth visits from one health facility to another.
Tom Lee of SA Ignite discusses interoperability and apps, security, and what’s next from this year’s HIMSS annual conference in Las Vegas, February 29th through March 4th.
By Jeff Jones – Declining reimbursement is one of the greatest financial challenges physicians face today. While there isn’t much you can do to stop reimbursement cuts, you can be proactive in learning about the Merit Based Incentive Payment System and how it will impact physician reimbursement.
By Robert Rowley MD – Utilization Management (UM) is ubiquitous in healthcare. It is a system of authorizations for procedures and some referrals, for the determination of medical necessity vs. elective, cosmetic or experimental procedures, for determining bed-day allowances in hospitals, and for establishing preferred drug formularies.
By John Halamka MD – Communicating the IT strategic plan is one of the primary responsibilities of a CIO. Most importantly, the IT strategic plan should be seen as an enterprise wide activity and not just an IT centric exercise. IT should be an enabler for the strategy of the business and every IT tactic should tie back to a high priority of the business.
By Adam Culbertson – The promise of EHRs is that they will improve quality and lower cost. The basis of this claim is in part due to a presumption of EHR interoperability. Patient matching has been identified as a critical barrier to interoperability. Patient matching refers to the act of accurately linking individuals to their health data located in various disparate electronic health databases.
By Jenny Gold – This season, Downton Abbey has a new plot line that has health wonks on the edge of their seats: a heated debate about hospital consolidation that closely parallels what’s going on in the U.S. health care system today.