News 6/4/13

CMS releases data on 30 types of outpatient procedures from across the county for such services as clinic visits, echocardiograms, and endoscopies. Average submitted charges for a Level 4 hospital clinic visit ranged from $111 (Charleston, SC) to $2,000 (St. Petersburg, FL); payments ranged from $48 (Sidney, OH) to $178 (San Jose, CA).

CMS also posted a de-identified list of over 146,000 EPs working with RECs that includes a breakdown by EHR vendor, implementation status, and specialty. Since RECs cater to smaller primary care practices and rural healthcare providers, I intend to take some time soon to crunch the numbers to better understand which vendors are dominating this segment.

Robert Tennant, MGMA’s government affairs senior policy advisor, discusses the need to protect patients and practices from HIPAA risk, including suggestions to mitigate problems should a provider lose his/her mobile device. Other risks addressed: the use of computer screens that might be visible to patients and visitors and  complications from a down server.

The local paper profiles Marietta, GA-based Nuesoft Technologies and its president and CEO Massoud Alibakhsh, who founded the company in 1993. Alibakhsh reports the company has historically grown 18 to 20 percent per year, but believes it may need to double its staff of 140 over the next two years as a result of its recent designation as a Practice Fusion billing partner.

Hayes Management Consulting expands its clinical and revenue cycle optimization service lines to include increased focus on measuring outcomes and outcome-driven operational improvement services.

I noticed on Hayes’ Website a blog post that offered some great recommendations for successful EMR physician training, including offering providers CME credits and engaging physicians as super-users.

Twitter is a popular and generally reliable source for health information, according to a University of Texas at Austin study of 9,510 vaccine-related tweets. Researchers conclude that healthcare providers and other stake holders should consider social media channels to address patient education in accessible and understandable ways.

iPads and iPhones are the top choices for physicians interacting with EHRs and staff, with 59 percent of office-based physicians saying they already integrate or are integrating tablets into their operations. Sixty-eight percent prefer iPhones over Androids or other platforms.

A study in Annals of Family Medicine looks at some of the ways innovative clinics are redesigning workflow to improve physician satisfaction. Included in the fixes: using MAs as scribes to create electronic documentation and delegating team members to filter normal lab results and prescription refills.

Vitera Healthcare completes the first of three waves of Stage 2 MU certification for its Intergy EHR solution.

The medical director of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital immunization registry says that children were nine percent more likely to be fully vaccinated for influenza when a pop-up alert was added to the children’s EMRs and synchronized with the New York City vaccine registry.

The Massachusetts Medical Society says it is working with several state agencies to develop recommendations on how to interpret and implement a state law that requires physicians to comply with EHR MU requirements in order to obtain licensure as of 2015. Depending on the interpretation, a nasty storm could be brewing, given the significant percentage of physicians either ineligible to participate in the MU program or simply opting out.

EMR record-keeping and duty hour limits have reduced the amount of time that doctors-in-training spend with patients to an average of eight minutes per patient, or about 12 percent of an intern’s day. Because of electronic documentation requirements, interns now spend almost half their days in front of a computer screen.

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