News 2/6/14

The overall readiness for ICD-10 implementation continues to lag, according to an MGMA survey of 570 medical practices. As noted by MGMA president and CEO Susan L. Turney, MD, “Very simply, ICD-10 is behind schedule.” MGMA finds that less than 10 percent of  practices are making significant progress in their overall ICD-10 readiness. Other key findings include:

• More than 80 percent of respondents will require an upgrade or replacement of their PM software to accommodate ICD-10 diagnosis codes.
• Vendors will not cover upgrade costs for the majority of practices. Average upgrade cost for a PM upgrade/replacement is $11,500 per FTE physician and $12,885 for EHR.
• Only 8.2 percent have begun testing with their EHR vendor and only 10 percent with their PM vendor.
• Nearly 60 percent of practices say they have not heard from their health plans regarding ICD-10 testing and nearly 50 percent have not heard from their clearinghouse vendor.
• Concerns remain high over the expected changes to clinical documentation and the loss of clinician and coding staff productivity.

Epic, eClinicalWorks, and Allscripts own about 30 percent of the overall EHR practice market according to an SK&A report from January, 2014. The top 20 EHRs are implemented in almost three-quarters of all practices that use an EHR.

Metro-North ACO (PR) selects eClinicalWorks Care Coordination Medical Record to advance its physician-led ACO objectives.

Surescripts introduces Record Locator & Exchange, which utilizes a master patient index to locate the medical records of a single patient, even when records are held by multiple providers, and, CompletetEPA, an end-to-end prior authorization solution that integrates into a physician’s EHR workflow and enables real-time information exchange between providers and pharmacy benefit managers.

ADP/AdvancedMD customer Jed Shay, MD shares how his use of AdvancedMD’s EHR and PM services have contributed to improved cash flow, productivity, and patient tracking.

North Carolina’s troubled Medicaid billing system goes off-line Tuesday morning for approximately 18 hours, impacting providers’ ability to submit claims. Computer Sciences Corp., which maintains the NCTracks portal, blames the failure of a network switch.

Covenant Surgical Partners will implement gMed’s gGastro EHR within 12 of  its physician offices and endoscopy procedure centers.

HHS finds that most health centers (72 percent) have been able to meet MU objectives related to data capture, but few (24 percent) have met objectives for sharing data. Only 14 percent of the 233 clinics surveyed had the capacity to meet all core Stage 1 objectives and at least five menu objectives.

Compared to patients who visit a doctor’s office for similar conditions, adults taking advantage of telehealth services are younger, more affluent, more technology savvy, and less likely to have used healthcare before their telehealth visit, according to a Health Affairs-published study.

 

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