All in a Day’s Work: Physicians Glued to E-mail, Phone

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Study suggests EHR could improve workflow efficiency. Answering e-mails and attending to other tasks that provide limited reimbursement keep primary care physicians busy these days, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed data from electronic health records. Led by Richard J. Baron, MD of Greenhouse Internists, a community-based internal medicine practice in Philadelphia, the study looked into the records of 8,440 patients between 15 and 99 years of age. Using EHR, it was able to track the average daily workload of a primary care physician for one year.

58 Percent of Physicians Plan to Adopt EHR Within 2 Years

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

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Yeah, I'm planning to dump this paper chart soon. And, many expect their hospitals to help them foot the bill. Physicians are eager to jump on the EHR bandwagon, reports a survey released today from the consulting and technology firm, Accenture. And they must be planning to get busy fast, given that only 6 percent of physicians Accenture contacted say they currently have “fully functioning” EMR systems. Physicians who don’t plan to adopt EMR might be planning to simply retire instead — when Accenture isolated physicians 55 and younger, they got 80 percent saying they would be implementing EHR within the next two years. The driver? The promise of HITECH incentive payments for early adoption and the threat of reduced Medicare payments if they don’t adopt by 2015. What HIT pros can learn from survey …

HITECH: Physicians Must Meet 25 Criteria To Achieve ‘Meaningful Use’

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

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While waiting for CMS guidelines, some practices have dragged heels on EHR adoption Practices that have been waiting for CMS to define the term “meaningful use” are finally in luck. But as is always the case when the feds are involved, don’t look for a quick one-sentence definition. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill of 2009 (ARRA) offers annual bonuses to practices that show “meaningful use” of electronic health records, and in 2015, practices that aren’t showing meaningful use will face penalties. However, the government was slow to issue a definition of the term “meaningful use,” causing some physicians to delay adoption of EHRs because they didn’t want to risk being a non-meaningful user. On Dec. 29, CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology announced that the definition was finally available for public comment. “CMS’s proposed regulation would define and specify how to demonstrate ‘meaningful…

Field-Tested E-Prescribe Training Tips

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

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Ditch the pad. If you’ve ever called a friend to program your TIVO or help you rejigger your privacy settings on Facebook, you know that even the sharpest techies sometimes need a little help from their friends. That’s what scares some physician practices away from e-prescribing, despite the easy two-percent e-prescribe bonus available to them in 2010. When it comes to training, your physician practice peers may not be able to coach you on whether their e-script implementation went smoothly, since many ofthem haven’t yet taken the plunge. “It is estimated that only 12 percent of office-based prescribers currently use e-prescribing,” says Barbara Cobuzzi, president of CRN Healthcare Solutions. When the time comes to train your staff on how to use the e-prescribing system, your best bet is to gather everyone together.

Paper Medical Records to EMR: The Dirty Little Secrets

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

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Physician practices that are implementing EMR dish on how ‘easy’ it actually is. With all the hype out there about converting from paper records to EMR, I’ve heard very little about how that process actually happens. That’s why I appreciated heating Kris Cuddy’s nuts-and-bolts EMR implementation session at the Billing & Collections Conference in Orlando this week. And I REALLY appreciated comments from physicians and office managers at her session about what it’s really been like for them to implement EMR at their practices. They have a perspective you sometimes don’t see in all the glowing predictions about how great EMR is going to be once we all adopt it. Three hours, said one workshop participant. That’s how long it took him to transfer his first medical record from paper to EMR. Subsequent conversions are going more quickly, but the office manager says…

CMS Begins to Distribute Millions Earmarked for EHRs

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

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Get your electronic health record in place so you can benefit from government bonuses. Late this summer, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the government would appropriate over a billion dollars in grants to help healthcare providers implement electronic health records (EHRs), and it didn’t take long for the first awards to be distributed. On Sept. 29, HHS announced that it had awarded $27.8 million to health center-controlled networks and large health centers to implement EHRs and other health information technology initiatives. The goal of the funding is to improve productivity, accuracy, and quality via the use of EHRs. “These funds to expand and upgrade electronic health records systems will make a huge difference for health centers struggling to provide health care to the growing number of people in need,” said Mary Wakefield, PhD, RN, administrator of HHS’s Health Resources and Service Administration, in a Sept. 29 statement.

Dude, Your Doc May Be Getting a Dell

Friday, September 11, 2009

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ARRA’s $19 billion for EMR won’t begin flowing much until 2010, but you can add another big player to the list of tech companies trying to add a big ole ‘H’ to their ‘IT’ offerings. PC-maker Dell Computer has announced it will partner with hospitals to offer physician groups EHR, reports The New York Times. Dell must see a big, if reluctant, potential physician market. Currently, only 17 percent of physicians have left paper behind, according to a 2008 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. EHR hardware, software & services in Aisle 5: Earlier this year, the Times reminds us, Dell teamed up with Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club to create affordable EMR solutions for small practices … More … Now on CD: Get the most from your soon-to-be EMR system and steer clear of compliance risks. With attorney Wayne Miller.

EHR: Show Your Physicians What’s In It For Them

Thursday, July 30, 2009

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Drop the paper chart, Tiger. If the clinicians at your hospital or health system are carping about your EHR system’s learning curve, here’s one way to win their buy-in. Show them how your EHR can reduce denials for their reimbursement on the Part B side. An EHR can eradicate a common reason physicians get denials for Part B services in Part A settings — a missing chief complaint, explains Jules Enatsky, RT, BSN, CPC-H, a senior consultant with JA Thomas & Associates. When several different specialists are seeing a hospital patient, for example, they begin their notes by commenting how the patient is responding to a treatment or medication, without documenting why the patient is being treated, Enatsky writes in The Coding Edge. “If an admitting physician and one or two consulting providers all bill subsequent inpatient care…

Tool Reveals Whether E-Prescribe Will Get Bang For Your Buck

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that physicians are eligible for e-prescribing bonuses, but will the cost of a new system or upgrade be worth it? The American Medical Association (AMA) has unveiled a new tool to help physician practices decide about e-prescribe. “A recent survey found about 30 percent of physician participants use an e-prescribing system in their practice,” said Joseph Heyman, MD, an AMA board member, in a June 30 statement. “This is a sizeable increase from the 13 percent who said the same at the end of last year.” The AMA’s online portal allows physician practices to calculate time savings and eligibility for incentive payments. Comparison shop: Potential e-prescribe buyers can access the AMA’s “system finder tool” that selects three systems that might suit your practice, based on your responses to a questionnaire. (Note to HIT vendors: Visit the site to see how you and your competitors stack up.) You an access the

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