News 8/27/15

Top News

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton puts telemedicine in the spotlight during a campaign speech at Des Moines Community College in Iowa. “Today, our healthcare system has changed dramatically, but it’s still too difficult for families in rural America to find quality, affordable healthcare,” she explained. “Telemedicine can help – and we should streamline licensing and explore how to make that reimbursable under Medicare.” Clinton also mentioned her desire to create a “national infrastructure bank” to meet rural America’s corresponding need for greater broadband access.

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Webinars

September 9 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Need to cleanse, unify and manage the provider data in your EMR master file and other IT systems?” Phynd’s Unified Provider Management platform allows healthcare organizations to maintain a single, verified, customized profile for each provider across legacy IT systems. This 30-minute presentation will explain how Phynd’s system can help synchronize internal provider information in real time; create provider interoperability among systems; and manage, update, and analyze provider information with workflow tools to improve revenue cycle and clinical communication.

Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by Labor Day.

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Announcements and Implementations

Patient education and engagement company StayWell works with 3M Health Information Systems to ensure its Krames Patient Education content is ICD-10 compliant.

Allscripts adds the ActX genomic decision-support app to its developer program. The app, which integrates with Allscripts ambulatory EHRs, automatically checks medications for drug-genomic interactions and  alerts physicians to potential patient risks.

ASD Center for Therapeutic Services implements billing and PM technology from Therapist Solutions at its two facilities in Connecticut.

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Government and Politics

ONC’s latest Health IT Standards Committee meeting focused on final recommendations from the Interoperability Standards Advisory Task Force, which likely spent much of the preceding weeks combing through public comments left by 59 organizations. You can dive into the 27 pages of meeting notes and summaries here. A quick read through left me (and the task force) puzzled as to why not one consumer group commented on the proposed standards.

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The local business paper highlights the challenges several NC-based medical groups face as participants in the Medicare Shared Savings Program. Multispecialty practice Cornerstone Health Care, which didn’t hit savings targets last year, will receive $2.2 million after realizing savings of nearly $5 million on total healthcare costs of $135 million. Cornerstone President and CEO Grace Tyrell, MD attributes the group’s success this time around to a shift in business models, including keeping practices open later and on the weekends and focusing on patients with chronic conditions. “It’s about the longer journey,” she adds. “We’re starting to see some of the results of the build of some of the new care models across the board. You can’t do it overnight.”

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Telemedicine

Doctor on Demand is quick to toot its own horn after CVS Health taps it (plus American Well and Teladoc) to help take its retail clinics to the next level of digital health. CEO Adam Jackson says the announcement is as big a deal if not bigger than the company’s partnerships with Anthem and United Healthcare in terms of direct exposure to consumers. As part of the deal, CVS and Doctor on Demand will refer patients to each other’s services when appropriate. Jackson also hinted that Doctor on Demand may eventually be in CVS stores via iPad, an arrangement it already has with the Wegmans grocery chain on the East Coast.

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Research and Innovation

Researchers determine that a computer program can better predict the onset of schizophrenia in children and young adults than traditional screening methods and advanced screening technologies. The automated speech-analysis program, which looked for “at least one occasion of a jarring disruption in meaning from one sentence to the next” during a 45-minute patient interview, predicted with 100-percent accuracy those at-risk patients who developed psychosis over a two-and-a-half year period and those who did not.

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Other

A Reuters employee inadvertently launches #ReutersReplyAllGate when he accidentally hits “reply all” and sends an email to 33,000 company employees, causing a chain reaction of hundreds of reply alls from employees telling each other to stop the insanity. The Wall Street Journal reported that, “The saga appeared to follow the typical narrative arc of a ‘reply allpocalypse,’ as pleas for mercy only made things worse.”

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Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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