After three years of waiting for the IRS to approve its mechanism for disbursing millions in grants to Pittsburgh-area physicians to help them upgrade their electronic record-keeping capabilities, Highmark has announced it is tweaking the plan to get around the need for IRS clearance. In 2005, Highmark announced plans to establish a $26.5 million fund that would have distributed grants of up to $7,000. Physicians were to use the money to invest in electronic record-keeping technology. But because the money was funneled through the eHealth Collaborative before reaching the doctors, the collaborative needed to obtain tax-exempt, charitable status from the IRS.
At UMass Memorial Medical Center, an effort is underway to trim costs by using radio frequency identification, or RFID. Proponents say it might save lives and money by preventing medical mistakes and speeding the recall of defective products.
Kaiser Permanente is endorsing the drive toward consumer-controlled personal health records in a partnership with Microsoft. The partnership will begin with a pilot project open to Kaiser's 156,000 employees, which will run until November. If successful, the product linking Kaiser's patient information with Microsoft's Health Vault personal health-record service will be offered to Kaiser's 8.7 million members.
A new Web page launched by the NC Institute of Medicine will help Medicaid recipients and people who don't have health insurance find doctors, clinics, dentists and other health resources in their communities. The site was established for the 1.5 million state residents who have no private insurance coverage. According to a recent study, only about half of uninsured North Carolina residents were aware of community services that could help them.
California Attorney General Jerry Brown has unveiled a plan to provide doctors and pharmacists with almost instant Internet access to patient prescription drug histories to help prevent so-called doctor shopping and other abuses of pharmaceuticals. Brown said that the state's prescription monitoring needs significant improvements because it now can take healthcare professionals weeks to obtain information on drug use by patients. That delay can allow some patients to get large quantities of drugs from multiple doctors for personal use or sale, he said.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has released a comprehensive plan for advancing health information technology. The plan is designed to serve as a guide to coordinate the federal government's health IT efforts, which seek to achieve nationwide implementation of an interoperable health IT infrastructure throughout both the public and private sector. The ONC-Coordinated Federal Health IT Strategic Plan focuses efforts along two primary goals: patient-focused healthcare, and population health, according to an ONC release.