Healthcare IT Update

Here’s the monetary incentive that should spur hospitals to help home health agencies participate in EHRs.

Last week, we looked at how some home health agencies are using telehealth to reduce hospital readmissions for congestive heart failure patients. Fewer hospital readmissions for CHF is good news on the OASIS, quality and survey fronts. The latest issue of CMIO shows how wired HHAs can benefit a hospital’s bottom line as well.

Medicare spends $12 billion a year on “potentially preventable” readmissions, estimates MedPAC, With figures like that, the cost-cutting feds are bound to act. “In the next two or three years, everything will be bundled payments. [Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers will] give so many dollars for the hospital and post-acute care,” predicts Musood Pirzada, director of information technology for the Rehabilitation Institute of Cleveland Clinic, which has an initiative to integrate…