News 2/17/11

Memorial Medical Center (WI) selects NextGen EHR for its ambulatory care clinic, as well as Inpatient Clinicals and Financials for the hospital.

Greenway client Children’s Clinic of Muskogee (OK) is the first pediatric practice in the country to qualify for Meaningful Use funds. The clinic’s four providers are set to receive an $85,000 check,  which will be handed out at the HIMSS conference next week.

AAFP announces AAFP Physicians Direct, a new $15 a month service that supports secure electronic communication between physicians. Participating physicians will be able to connect to Surescripts to share data through the AAFP Physician Direct web portal or through certain EMRs. Initially Amazing Charts, e-MDs, and SOAPware are the EMRs that will leverage the Surescripts network to provide clinical interoperability between providers.

CMS says it will reprocess many physician claims filed under the 2010 Medicare physician fee schedule. Apparently some fees were affected by the retroactive dates included in certain provisions of last year’s health reform law. Though the law was signed in March, some of the fee changes were retroactive to January 2010.

Vitality and AT&T win the 2011 Global Mobile award for the AT&T-connected Vitality GlowCaps in the Best Embedded Mobile Product/Device (non-handset) category.  The Glowcaps fit on a standard prescription bottle and use light, sound, text, and phone reminders to encourage patients to take their medicine at the proper time.

Speaking of GlowCaps, Dr. Joseph Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health, says he uses one for his cholesterol lowering medication.  The Center for Health works to identify technology that can help change patient behavior and improve health outcomes.

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If you read HIStalk, then you already know that I am heading to Orlando for HIMSS this weekend. I’m not sure what we will be posting on HIStalk Practice next week, but perhaps I will highlight a few items more of interest to those in the ambulatory world.  Last year I spent some time walking the exhibit floor with a doctor friend and plan to do so again this year. It’s interesting to hear a physician’s take on things, as well as experience the doctor-specific pitch from vendors.  If you have any suggestions, let me know.

3M Health Information Systems and Nuance announce a strategic partnership to deliver ICD-10-ready clinical documentation and coding solutions, starting with Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation, which combines Nuance’s speech recognition technology with 3M’s Clinical Documentation Improvement content. CAPD allows physicians to dictate encounters in their own words while prompting them for any additional information needed for proper ICD-9 and ICD-10 coding, enabling clinical documentation improvement a the point of dictation. It was designed to accelerate the implementation of ICD-10 and works . Mr. H chatted with Nuance’s Janet Dillione and 3M’s Jon Lindekugel about the partnership here.

Emdeon forms a strategic alliance with LabCorp to deliver a co-branded EHR Lite solution for physicians. The Emdeon-LabCorp EHR LITE program includes the Web-based Emdeon Clinician, which is integrated within the Emdeon Office Suite. The Office Suite package includes a variety of RCM and practice management tools, and integration with LabCorp testing ordering and results. I’ll be checking it out at HIMSS.

E-mail Inga.