News 7/24/12

CMS posts updated data on MU attestations by vendor. On the ambulatory EHR side,  Epic accounts for twice the number of attestations compared to the next closest vendor, Allscripts, whose numbers are a roll-up of four different products. More than 70,000 EPs attested using products from over 300 vendors, but the top four vendors made up almost half of all the complete ambulatory EHR attestations. I used Excel to massage these numbers and just this simple graph was a bear to create. If you like to number crunch, you might want to find a more robust reporting tool.

Providence Health & Services plans to deploy Nuance’s Dragon Medical 360 voice recognition technology across its 250 clinics and 27 hospitals. Over the next year, Providence will integrate Dragon with Epic EHR for the health system’s 8,000 clinicians.

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) introduces legislation to extend Medicare physician payment rates for one year as Congress continues to work on a payment program to replace the current sustainable growth-rate formula.

CalHIPSO adds Mitochon Systems, Medstreaming, and Meditab/SuiteMed to its list of EHR vendor partners. CalHIPSO’s CIO notes that the new vendors offer “an economical option for small and solo practices that are ready to adopt an EHR.”

Lifelong Medical (CA), Summit Orthopedics (CO), and Midwest Eye Care (NE) implement Indigo Indentityware’s SSO and authentication solution along with BIO-key International’s fingerprint biometric software to access their EMRs.

Arthritis and Rheumatology Associates of Palm Beach (FL) selects TSI Healthcare to deploy, train, service, and host their NextGen System.

Curious: Safe Future ACO, a South Florida organization with a pending CMS application to named an ACO, posts an ad on Craig’s List recruiting physician participants. The posting offers primary care physicians the opportunity for shared savings of up to $100,000 a year.

A June report by the Office of the Inspector General reveals that eClinicalWorks is the single most utilized product by the 1,500 Medicare physicians participating in a 2011 survey.

E-mail Inga.