By Jonathan Draper – Every day, hospitals and health systems across the country struggle with exchanging patient data between electronic health records, PACS and other health information systems. In a recent survey, for example, accountable care organizations (ACOs) cited lack of interoperability as their number one challenge to achieving improved, patient-centered care.
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By Robert Rowley MD – The way we pay for healthcare is changing. The transition from fee-for-service (“fee for volume”) to value-based care is beginning to take shape, and will do so increasingly in the next few years. Federal pressures as well as private industry pressures are driving this change, as reviewed nicely in a white paper by Houlihan Lokey, “Value-Based Care.”
By Art Gross – Last month a hospital in Hollywood, CA was a victim of a ransomware attack that left computers unusable for over a week. According to a ZDNet article, the Southern California hospital was unable to practice its usual day-to-day operations.
By Andy Slavitt & Karen B. DeSalvo – The great promise of technology is to bring information to our fingertips, connect us to one another, improve our productivity, and create a platform for the next generation of innovations.
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.
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.
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.