Joseph Goedert, Health Data Management
“The complexities of clinical quality measures in the 2014 Edition of the electronic health records meaningful use program may outweigh potential benefits as the measures are beyond the ability of many EHR vendors and providers to comply with.
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Jennifer Bresnick, EHR Intelligence
“You can order all your coding workbooks, schedule your physician lectures, hand out ICD-10 lollipops by the dozen, and nag your vendors until you’re blue in the face, but the chances of your hospital being fully prepared for ICD-10 without a strong project plan and central leadership are slim at best.
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Jennifer Bresnick, EHR Intelligence
“The American Medical Association (AMA) has released a report clarifying its position on the idea of skipping ICD-10 altogether and moving straight to ICD-11 when it becomes available in an unknown number of years. While the AMA has been protesting the implementation of ICD-10 for some time, and continues to do so, the report states that moving straight to ICD-11 is “fraught with pitfalls” and “not recommended.”
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Bruce Japsen, Forbes
“The health care industry is “not progressing at a suitable pace” to be ready for tens of thousands of new government-mandated “ICD-10” codes used to describe diseases and hospital procedures in the insurance billing process, a new analysis shows.
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Healthcare Innovation Center
“A recent peer-reviewed article in Preventing Chronic Disease, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that an EHR-analyzing algorithm that went beyond parsing four-digit ICD-9 data was markedly superior to analysis based solely on those entries.
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Betsy Nicoletti, Physicians Practice
“It’s official. In the spring of 2014 Jimmy Fallon will move “The Tonight Show” to New York City. The World Cup will return in the summer. And in the fall, healthcare providers will see a significant change as claims for services provided on or after October 1, 2014, will need to use ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes.
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Beth Walsh, Clinical I&T
“A new survey from the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) on IDC-10 preparations finds a disturbing lack of industry progress during the past year.
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Jennifer Bresnick, EHR Intelligence
“It’s too much work. It’s too expensive. It’s too confusing. It’ll slow my coders down. With all the fears, complaints, warnings, and dire predictions surrounding ICD-10, it’s easy to lose sight of the benefits that the new code set will bring to medicine starting on October 1, 2014.
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Joseph Goedert, Health Data Management
“Stage 2 of the electronic health records meaningful use program begins in October 2013 for hospitals and January 2014 for eligible professionals, and right after that comes the October 2014 compliance date for the ICD-10 code sets. A session during the ICD-10 Symposium on March 3 before HIMSS13 in New Orleans, “ICD-10 and Meaningful Use: When Worlds Collide,” will explore the coming convergence of the two initiatives.
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John Glaser, H&HN Daily
“In many ways the meaningful use program is well-conceived.
The focus on use that is meaningful shifted the industry from its prior focus on adoption. The number of hospitals that adopt computerized provider order entry is less important than whether those hospitals use CPOE extensively to enter orders.
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Jennifer Bresnick, EHR Intelligence
“Texas has about a dozen HIEs, and they run the gamut from entirely sophisticated and quite capable in a few specific instances, to really just barely functional at all. They’re very highly segmented. I know Austen has one, and they’ve made an effort to link to a Houston group in order to exchange information. Interestingly, the impetus was dealing with a population of indigent patients.
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Carl Natale, Government Health IT
“Last week we learned that there was a little bit of irrational exuberance regarding how valuable electronic health records (EHR) will be to cutting healthcare costs. Which doesn’t mean it’s time to scrap your EHR projects.
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Jennifer Bresnick, EHR Intelligence
“CMS condemns it. Payers won’t reimburse for it. Auditors will take you to task for it – but vendors flaunt it and physicians embrace it unreservedly. What’s wrong with using an EHR to automatically copy information from one patient note to the next? The time-saving practice known as “cloning” is one of the things that makes EHRs so popular, and yet the government sees it as a breeding ground for fraud and abuse.
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Beth Walsh, Clinical I&T
“Get planning,” said Sira Cormier, MBA, principal of CSC which operates the New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN). “ICD-10 is not just an IT problem. Everybody needs to be involved in the planning.” Cormier and her coworker spoke during the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium’s forum on ICD-10 on Dec. 13.
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Beth Walsh, Clinical I&T
“The healthcare industry is in a “state of shock and awe and fear” over ICD-10, said Annie Boynton, director of provider regulatory compliance (ICD-10) communication, adoption and training for UnitedHealth Group, speaking at the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium’s Dec. 13 program on the topic.
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Beth Walsh, Clinical I&T
“Establishing structured timelines and plans for software upgrades, training and testing are essential elements of a good plan for transitioning to ICD-10, said Renee Richard, health insurance specialist and ICD-10 lead at the Boston regional office of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), speaking at the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium’s Dec. 13 program on the topic.
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Beth Walsh, Clinical I&T
“The looming shift to ICD-10 is “monumental” and requires collaboration in every aspect, according to speakers at the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium’s Dec. 13 program on the subject. There was a clear sense of urgency if not outright panic from some speakers about the enormity of the transition.
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David L. Miller, H&HN Daily
“I often hear it said that the use of benefit realization is not a common practice in health care. I know that this is particularly true for information technology, and I suspect it is true throughout our industry. When it comes to large-scale expenditures of resources, we usually assume that it is a necessary cost of doing business, usually in response to market-driven forces, regulatory requirements or needed upgrades in infrastructure.
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Justine Cadet, CMIO
“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius launched a final rule to make definitive a one-year proposed delay—from Oct. 1, 2013, to Oct. 1, 2014—in the compliance date for use of new codes that classify diseases and health problems. The final rule also establishes a unique health plan identifier.
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Health Data Management
“Some Health Data Management readers are not impressed with the American Medical Association’s decision to evaluate preliminary versions of ICD-11 as a possible alternative to replace ICD-9.
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