The EHR Interoperability Disincentive
“If you bring her to our urgent care, we’ll be able to see what was done in her record,” the pediatric R.N. told me with a winning smile when I’d asked what to do if my 3-year-old’s urinary tract infection wasn’t better by the following day, a weekend.
It was a subtle and winning bit of patient steerage that I’d run into many times before, both personally and when dealing with health issues for my children. There is an urgent care office just blocks from our home, but when ill, my
Go to the Gemba on Meaningful Use
A key feature of Lean management systems is going to the site of the “original work” to study how things are done and how changes affect operations. In Lean lingo, it is called going to the Gemba — an anglicized version of the Japanese word meaning “the real place.”
While I was writing about the Stage 2 Meaningful Use (MU) regulations for electronic health record (EHR) incentive payments, one of my neighbors stopped by. As she is a nurse at a large famous academic health system, I quickly turned the conversation from kids and gardening to what was
Meaningful Use at SIIM 2011
There was one thing on the minds of the attendees and exhibitors at last week’s SIIM 2011 meeting, and it wasn’t the Scripps National Spelling Bee taking place down the hall (although the kids were undeniably adorable). It was, of course, meaningful use, the two words none of us ever want to hear again, but seem fated to hear over and over until at least 2016.
Dr. Keith Dreyer gave an excellent address outlining the impact of the provisions for both eligible professionals and vendors – look for more on that in the forthcoming summer issue of RBJ.
“They Said It, But They Didn’t Mean It”: MIPPA, Meaningful Use and Supervision
For my last session today, I decided to attend a presentation on “legal issues that lots of people ask about lately” given by the inimitable Ken Davis Jr, JD, partner with Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP. Davis dove right in with the topics of Medicare payment withholding and MIPPA-mandated accreditation, both kicking in at the end of next year.
As of December 31st, 2011 all Medicare payments will come with 3% withholds—with notable exceptions, including public assistance payments made on basis of need or income or payments to tax-exempt organizations. Yet another competitive advantage for most hospitals. Also coming
The Marseillaise, Southern Style
Way down South below the meeting rooms, a mood of revolt percolated across the exhibit floor. Maybe it was the two sets of stairs required to make the descent into the exhibits or maybe people just didn’t have any money to spend, but the level of commercial activity in the booths was nothing to write home about. Attendance did appear sparser than in the recent past, but the real surprise would have been if hadn’t been. SIIM is not immune to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Vendors, however, were looking for an
Leaving Charlotte (Congress, Are You Listening?)
I left the meeting wishing I had arranged to fly out after the last session rather than before. I also left with a deepened respect for the remarkable work being done by imaging informaticists, and a sense of anticipation about what is to come. Let’s face it: it takes more than software and hardware to ensure digital communications. It takes experienced, innovative IT people who can adapt these tools to individual workflows. And then keep adapting. And adapting. And adapting some more. The job is never done.
Imagine what could happen if Congress deputized these people
Northern Exposures
Over a sandwich on the exhibit hall floor and a white chocolate chip cookie the size of my head, I had an interesting conversation about national health IT initiatives with a radiologist attending from Hamilton in Ontario, Canada, David A. Koff, MD. What is interesting are the parallels between the Canadian and the US efforts to built a functional national EMR. The level of financing and its source are very much the same. Canada is spending about $2 billion on its effort, the Canada Health Infoway, and the US, with about 10 times the population, has allocated close to $20 billion in
Stimulus Opps More Ephemeral Than Monetary
7 PM: A morning session on Economic Stimulus Package Funding Opportunities may have disappointed those looking for hard and fast guidance on how to pay for imaging informatics with some of the $19.2 billion allocated for EMRs. No fault, of course, of presenters Bradley J. Erickson, MD, PhD, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, David S. Mendelson, MD the Mount Sinai Medical Center, and Eliot Siegel, MD, University of Maryland and the VA Maryland Health Care System. The details are still vague.
But the session began to build a scaffold around how radiology may fit into the bigger picture. Meaningful use is
