There's little chance the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology can inject significant principles from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology report into Stage 2 of its Meaningful Use incentive program. The reason it's a long shot is the industry lacks a standardized universal exchange language message wrapper, according to Stan Huff and Dixie Baker, both members of the PCAST Workgroup, a subgroup of ONC's HIT Policy Committee. Workgroup Chair Paul Egerman, a retired software entrepreneur, set the tone for the meeting by noting that the group's mandate was to discuss the PCAST report's "implications and feasibility" on Meaningful Use not to "not to criticize the report, if it's good or bad or right or wrong."
Health information technology (IT) has benefited even small physician practices, according to a new report that contradicts other recent findings claiming that electronic health records (EHRs) and other health IT do not yield the benefits most providers expect.
Previous studies focused on the early years of electronic health records (EHR) when functions were not as mature, according to one of the authors of the survey article, David Blumenthal, MD, the national coordinator for health IT. He made the comments at a briefing sponsored by Health Affairs journal to announce its latest published studies.
Furthermore, the survey found evidence of emerging measurable benefits for small practices in addition to the larger health IT leaders, such as Kaiser Permanente and the Veterans Affairs Department, which have been the source of much experience data in the past, he said.
“Two salient aspects of this more recent synthesis is that it brings the literature up to date and extends it beyond the few large systems that were the source of most information on the record for health information technology, and looks at it in a much more representative set of provider settings,” Blumenthal said.
In the survey of 154 peer-reviewed articles from 2007 to 2010, the article found that 92% of the studies reached conclusions that indicated overall positive effects with the use of health IT, he said.
HealthTexas primary care providers spent $10,325 per physician and took 134.3 hours to put the EHR into practice, according to Neil Fleming, MD, vice president for health care research at Baylor Health Center System, who also spoke at the briefing. For a five-member practice, EHR implementation cost $7,857 and 130 hours.
Another study concluded that more than four in five office-based physicians could qualify for the meaningful use incentives, said one of its authors, Brian Bruen, PhD, lead research scientist and lecturer at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services.
Blumenthal said that regional extension centers, which ONC established to assist primary providers with overcoming the technical hurdles to adopting EHRs, have signed up 50,000 providers nationwide. And almost 34,000 providers have registered with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to participate in the meaningful use incentive program to date.
CMS has already paid $34 million in incentives under the Medicaid program to 216 Medicaid providers in four states, Blumenthal said.
A jury trial set to open on today will weigh whether one of America's largest health care corporations should be held accountable for deaths and injuries at a New Orleans hospital marooned by floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina. The class-action suit is expected to highlight desperate e-mail exchanges, not previously made public, between the hospital and its corporate parent. "Are you telling us we are on our own and you cannot help?" Sandra Cordray, a communications manager at Memorial Medical Center, which sheltered some 1,800 people, wrote to officials at the Tenet Healthcare Corporation's Dallas headquarters after begging them for supplies and an airlift. The suit, brought on behalf of people who were at the hospital during the disaster, alleges that insufficiencies in Memorial's backup electrical system and failed plans for patient care and evacuation, among other factors, caused personal injury and death.
Obama administration officials say they were expecting praise from critics of the new healthcare law when they offered to exempt selected employers and labor unions from a requirement to provide at least $750,000 in coverage to each person in their health insurance plans this year. Instead, Republicans have seized on the waivers as just more evidence that the law is fundamentally flawed because, they say, it requires so many exceptions. To date, for example, the administration has relaxed the $750,000 standard for more than 1,000 health plans covering 2.6 million people. The waivers have become a flash point as supporters and opponents try to shape public perceptions of the law, the Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama last March 23.
California emergency room doctors are fighting to preserve a state fund that compensates them for treating poor, uninsured patients at private hospitals — money that lawmakers want to shift to the federal insurance program in order to help bridge the budget gap. But doctors say the shift would still leave millions uninsured for the next several years, raising questions about who will pick up the tab at already strained emergency rooms. "We can't deny care to anybody. The hospitals that are barely making it through, this is going to make it unsustainable," said Arturo Pelayo, MD, an emergency physician at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, where up to 20% of the nearly 70,000 emergency patients they see each year are covered by the Emergency Medical Services, or "Maddy," fund.
The doctor was angry. Not long after Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts urged him and other health care providers to keep their costs down, the insurer this month disclosed it had agreed to an $11 million payout for its former chief executive. In a terse voicemail, the physician told Blue Cross: You have a credibility problem. It was the kind of call Andrew Dreyfus expected. Hired as CEO of Blue Cross last fall, Dreyfus has been championing affordability — prodding payers and providers to work together to rein in the price of medical care following years of double-digit insurance premium increases. Then came the uproar over millions of dollars collected by his predecessor, Cleve L. Killingsworth, and headlines about five-figure annual fees paid to board members. Suddenly, the talk about lowering healthcare costs rang hollow. To many, Killingsworth's pay package and the board's fees— which were suspended more than a week ago in an effort to diffuse the public outcry— undercut Dreyfus's call to control healthcare spending. "It's hard to reconcile those two messages,'' he admitted.