News 11/29/11

The Arizona REC adds Office Ally, developer of the 24/7 EHR product, to its list of approved EHR vendors.

A recent tweet from Greenway Medical VP Justin Barnes gives some indication of where PrimeSuite EHR clients are in terms of achieving Meaningful Use:

Still tallying, but Greenway Medical customers have received almost $5 Million in EHR Meaningful Use Incentives.

According to my back of the envelope math, that’s about 275 Eligible Providers, assuming each received the $18,000 Medicare incentive and not the higher Medicaid incentive. athenahealth says about 1,250 of their EPs have attested; meridianEMR reports 162 client attestations and 67 payments. I’d love to know figures from some other EHR vendors.

Visits to retail health clinics are on the rise, especially in areas where patients live closer to the retail site than to their primary care doctor. Younger people, especially women, are more likely to seek care at retail clinics, as are patients that are relatively healthy, have higher incomes, and commercial insurance. Across the country’s 1,360 retail clinics, 11 acute conditions account for 88% of all the clinics’ acute-care visits.

Another trend: school-based health centers, which were allocated $200 million as part of the healthcare reform law. In California, for example, the number of school health centers has grown from 121 in 2004 to 183 today.

An Alaskan chiropractor whose patient information was found to be wide open on the Internet says a EMR4Doctors.com, a Las Vegas-based EMR vendor he used for a short period in 2008, is responsible. He says the vendor stored his patient information in an unsecured text file that a patient found when Googling his own name. The chiropractor has contacted HHS and the media and is considering legal action against the vendor. The doctor believes the company is defunct, though the company seems to have an active Web page and a working 800 number.

The AMA introduces My Medications, an app that allows patients to use their smart phones to store and exchange health data with doctors. The app is available for $0.99 and includes fields for  allergies, medications, and emergency contacts.

The Best in Biz Awards 2011 bestows silver honors to Sue Chilson, CIO and VP of information technology for billing service provider MedData. Chilson was recognized for her contributions in the  building of a Web-based patient account information application that streamlined business operations.

Texas Health Care reports that 63 of its 140 providers have met Meaningful Use benchmarks using NextGen’s EHR.

Email Inga.