By John Halamka MD – Meaningful Use Stage 2 has a requirement that I’ve always considered to be the “cart before the horse” – patients must be able to View/Download/Transmit their data. Viewing is great – we’ve done that at BIDMC since 1999 for all patients and all data.
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Technology use in our society is advancing day by day if not minute by minute and we can choose to either jump on board the train or watch from the sidelines at the station. The AMA says you need to hop on board the technology train, more specifically the telemedicine train.
A “value-based digital health” reimbursement model as a plausible payment solution for new technology appeared in the 2016 McKinsey Report How Healthcare Systems Can Become Digital-Health Leaders by Gerardo Aue. The concept advocates that since health systems hold the data needed to measure outcomes, why not use this information to measure the outcomes of digital health services?
‘Connected Communities’ Grants Aim to Address Critical Healthcare Issues Via Increased Use of Innovative Technologies. MeHI, the Massachusetts eHealth Institute at MassTech, awarded $3,038,000 in grants to drive community-level collaboration among healthcare providers using innovative technologies.
By Sarianne Gruber – “There are a lot of tech savvy people making apps for tech-savvy people. It’s a wonderful world that we live in with the ability to do that but we are not going to bend the cost curve in the United States by providing an app for an otherwise healthy forty-year-old person with diabetes or for the sixty-year-old that has a heart condition who is out on the golf course.
The National Association for Trusted Exchange welcomed its newest member, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. By joining NATE and participating in the NATE Blue Button for Consumers Trust Bundle, VA is demonstrating its commitment to enabling its Veterans to send their health data to the consumer-facing application of their choice.
By Deanne Kasim – With the increase in specialty drugs, innovative diagnostic testing, and precision medicine, it is expected that the use of the Prior Authorization will only increase with health insurance companies. Of course I have heard from many re: the (theoretical) fact that as the use of value-based provider reimbursement matures, there will be less and less need for a PA process.
By Roger Davis – “We are deadly serious about interoperability.” – Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator of the CMS at the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco in January 2016. For those of us in the healthcare vendor community, that defining statement sets the tone for the future interaction between organizations.
By Patrick Conway MD – Last year, a bipartisan Congressional majority passed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, or MACRA. We have worked in the same spirit as the law’s model of partnership and progress as we implement policies to improve the health and well-being of Americans.