What You Need To Do To Get ARRA’s EHR Adoption Incentive Money

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Having trouble plodding through the 555-page HITECH reg? Our experts spell out the basic requirements for collecting cash. If you help to run a hospital or a physician’s office that sees Medicare and Medicaid patients, you might think you know red tape. Well, if you plan on seeing any of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 incentive money for adopting electronic health records technology, get ready for a whole new world of red before you see any green. On Dec. 30, 2009, CMS issued a proposed rule that would implement the incentive payment provisions of ARRA. Payments will be offered to Medicare and Medicaid providers and facilities that adopt and “meaningfully use” electronic health record technology, and this proposed rule is the first indication of how CMS plans to define ARRA’s requirements. The most anticipated part of the reg…

Already Got Great HIT At Your Health Care Organization?

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

0 Comments

Want $235 Million Dollars? Sometimes providers that already have established HIT systems complain that all the ARRA money is headed towards just getting started with HIT and EMR. But HHS has announced a new grants program aimed at helping “Beacon Communities” build on HIT excellence and take ‘leadership’ roles in health care communities. “In a press teleconference [last] Tuesday, U.S. health secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the new Beacon Community Program grants will help communities of healthcare providers “get a handle” on improving care through the meaningful use of IT,” reports Information Week. These grants will total $235 million. “The grants will not be awarded to healthcare providers to start up health IT initiatives, but rather to communities that are already national leaders in their use of IT to advance healthcare quality, safety, efficiency, and population health…” More from I nformation Week …

Piecemeal Approach Might Avoid Stark Problems with EMR Incentives

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

0 Comments

If you’re a physician practice and you’re ready to line up for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 money to help you adopt a system for electronic medical records (EMR), don’t forget Stark and the fraud and abuse laws when you set up your agreements with hospitals and vendors. In a recent webinar, “EMR: Meeting Stark, F&A and ARRA Mandates,” Wayne Miller, a lawyer with the Compliance Law Group in Los Angeles, said that financing continues to be a roadblock to implementation of EMR systems. At this point, only 10% of hospitals and 20% of physicians offices have adopted them, according to Miller. “Even with stimulus money, adoption of EMR is very low,” he pointed out. “It is not exploding as people expected.” Because of the economy, there are fewer opportunities for providers to get the money they need…

ARRA Grants: $80 Million for Community College HIT Programs

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

0 Comments

Application deadline is January 22, 2010. The feds understand that we’ll need legions of new HIT workers to implement national EHR goals, so they’re forking over $80 million in ARRA funds to train them at the community college level. Good news for health care vets who want to develop new HIT skills: The grant funds will support non-degree, community college programs that students can complete in about 6 months — which means you may have more options for HIT continuing education as you continue to work your day job. The programs can be live, online or a combination of the two. Who’s eligible to apply for a piece of the $80 million: “Any U.S. non-profit institution of higher learning currently engaged in providing healthcare IT training that is interested in drafting curriculum or establishing a consortium that includes community colleges may apply for the grants,” reports Healthcare IT News. What…

HIT Staffing: Do We Need IT Experts or Health Care Experts?

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

0 Comments

Or do we need both? Training & teamwork strategies that bridge the divide. Refugees from the technology and financial busts are flooding into health care to get their share of stimulus billions, but health care providers won’t get their money’s worth unless they build collaborative teams who really understand what the ‘H’ means in HIT. If you read IT industry news, you come away with the impression that IT professionals with no health care setting experience have all they need to ‘fix’ HIT. A recent ‘Career Tips’ article for IT professionals who want to get into health care is an example. Between 50,000 and 100,000 new HIT jobs will sprout up by 2015, says Information Week, an IT industry trade publication that’s been around for years. “If you’re considering a career path into health IT — but have limited have previous experience working in clinical environments, don’t despair,”…

Health Care Organizations Lag on HIT Security

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

0 Comments

Despite new legal requirements like HITECH, health care organizations have not made a lot of progress in the last year in preparing for security challenges such as privacy breaches and electronic PHI, according to a new survey released Nov. 3, 2009 by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. “Healthcare organizations have made relatively little change since the assessment of the market HIMSS conducted in 2008 across a number of important areas of the security environment,” warns the industry group in its 2009 Security Survey. “Respondents characterized their own maturity level as mid-range, budgets dedicated to security remain low, and many organizations still do not have a formally designated CSO/CISO.”

Predict Your ARRA Dollars With This Handy Incentive Calculator

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

0 Comments

By now we’ve all heard that hospitals that meet ARRA’s criteria get to collect incentives starting at $2 million. The government will then adjust that figure based on your hospital’s Medicare discharges and the year that you make the EHR transition. Buy-and-install or Internet based? Jim Sheldon-Dean shows you how to make the right EHR decision for your health care organization. Just how much will your facility get? That can be a head scratcher. Calculate your anticipated share of funding with this breakdown of the Medicare incentive formula. Formula: For acute care prospective payment system (PPS) hospitals the formula is: Initial Amount times Medicare Share times Transition Factor = Total Incentive Amount The “Initial Amount” is $2 million plus $200 for each discharge between the 1,150th and 23,000thdischarge in a 12-month period. There is no credit for the first 1,149 discharges or discharges…

HHS OCR Is New HIPAA Security Regulator

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

0 Comments

You’ve got a new sheriff in town for HIPAA enforcement. The Department of Health and Human Services is handing over the administration and enforcement of the Security Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) to the HHS Office for Civil Rights. CMS formerly oversaw enforcement of the rule. The Security Rule specifies a series of administrative, technical, and physical security procedures for covered entities to use to assure the confidentiality of electronic-protected health information. OCR has enforced HIPAA’s Privacy Rule since 2003. CMS hopes the Security’s Rule’s move to OCR will trim some administrative inefficiency and improve regulation, given that privacy and security are so closely connected. “The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), mandated improved enforcement of the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule,” points out

Seeking the Meaning of ‘Meaningful Use?’

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

0 Comments

We’ve all heard the term ‘meaningul use,’ but what exactly does it mean? The latest American Medical News tackles the ‘meaningful use’ question. To qualify for ARRA incentives, it’s not enough to simply purchase EHR. They must achieve ‘meaningful use.’ Here are some bullet-quick takeaways for HIT professionals seeking a path to enlightenment: HHS hasn’t officially defined ‘meaningful use’ in a regulation, but there’s enough language in the legislation to guess what the feds will say before their end-of-year deadline. Meaningful use involves system certification, as well as capabilities for electronic prescribing, quality reporting and information exchange. If you’re buying HIT now, the no-surprises approach is to go with a big vendor that will adapt your system to developing federal regs. Best way to get a jump on achieving meaningful use in your health care organization? Seek out those paper holdouts among your clinicians, and ‘electrify’ them. More from AMNews…

Your Quick Start Guide to ARRA

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

0 Comments

ARRAAAAAGH! New law gives HIPAA sharper teeth. You’ve got some new things on your to-do list, HIT pros. The byzantine stimulus package passed earlier this year has some new HIPAA requirements tucked away here and there. Here’s what our technology & attorney experts are saying about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Wake-up call: You bear the IT compliance burden even if a third party installs and maintains your system. Even smaller health care organizations are responsible for ensuring the same privacy protections as larger places that have their own IT departments, says Jim Sheldon-Dean, founder and director of compliance services at Lewis Creek Systems in Vermont. Stricter notifications: Under ARRA, you must notify patients “without unreasonable delay” and in no case later than 60 calendar days after you discover that unsecured electronic health information was improperly “accessed, acquired or disclosed.”

Healthcare IT Update

Tag Archive | "ARRA"