News 6/27/13

Humana earns the top spot in athenahealth’s 2013 PayerView Report, which ranks health insurers based on claims-payment data. Other highlights from the report:

• Medicaid continues to underperform on key metrics, such as days in A/R
• Many payers performed worse than the 95 percent benefit accuracy, including six payers that returned correct co-pay information less than 50 percent of the time
• Payers still require enrollment by fax or mail for 65 percent of transactions.

The seven-provider Athens Bone and Joint Orthopedic Clinic (GA) selects simplifyMD’s EHR.

Financial management issues are the most challenging difficulties facing group practice executives, according to an MGMA member survey. Specific concerns include managing rising operating costs, preparing for potential cuts in reimbursement rates, and navigating transformative federal policies. Implementing an EHR is considered less of a challenge than a year ago, but optimizing an existing EHR has become a more pressing concern.

Orion Healthcorp., a provider of medical billing and coding for physician offices, names Dale Brinkman (Western Skies Billing Service) CEO and promotes Joseph Seale from COO to president.

UCSF Dermatopathology and Oral Pathology Service selects McKesson to provide revenue management services for its eight-physician group.

Kareo reports that one-third of the 4,000 providers signed up for its EHR have moved from another EHR system.

Consumer Reports publishes an excellent overview of the PCMH model that should be a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the why and how of this emerging care model. The article outlines what a PCMH is, how it is run, how it can reduce costs, and how it benefits patients. The use of “smart medical records” is recommended to facilitate preventative care,  improve provider-patient and provider-provider communications, and manage the coordinated care process. If you work for a vendor serving the ambulatory physician market, it’s worth the read. If nothing else, you will seem really smart at your next company cocktail party.

A Maine newspaper profiles Michael Clark, MD, owner of Lifespan Family Healthcare Center, which is part of the PCMH Pilot Program. Clark believes the success of the PCMH is dependent on modern technology, including EMRs that are available to both providers and patients:

Electronic medical records allow for easier tracking of complex medical problems, help to prevent medication prescription errors, provide automatic reminders for overdue care, flag critical lab values and improve coordination among different specialists and healthcare facilities. Equally important, patients have the same access to all of their records as providers.

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News 6/25/13

From Sleepless: “Re: Priorities. The customer should be the priority, but you know how people are programmed to cater to doctors’ schedules and timelines. It is as though we are living in the 1950’s. I also find it offensive when I call the doc office or pharmacy and get the recording that says doctors press 1 and the rest of you press 2.” Apparently I am not the only one who is annoyed by office staff that seem to believe their doctor’s time is more valuable than mine. As another reader pointed out, the staff’s priority should be to assist, “the one with cash in their hand.”

eClinicalWorks has signed up 1,000 providers to its RCM during the first six months of 2013 and is projected to reach $100 million in revenues by 2015. eCW offers the service for 2.9 percent of monthly collected revenues and includes EHR.

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal announces that athenahealth will expand into Atlanta, bring 500 new jobs, and make an $10.8 million investment in the Ponce City Market area.

An American Medical News article discusses ways that practices can use patient data from EHRs to  impact the way care is delivered and identify improvements on the business side. For example, EHRs help practices identify patients in need of preventative care, facilitate the management of chronic care cases, and monitor outcomes. To improve population health, experts recommend using Meaningful Use measurements as a guide and selecting target measures from the 64 included in Stage 2.

The AMA votes to lobby CMS for a two-year grace period to avoid complying with the ICD-10 transition, despite the announcement last week by ONC head Farzad Mostashari, MD that there will be no additional ICD-10 delays.

A CMS study concludes that adoption of EHRs in community practices doesn’t necessarily decrease costs, but can facilitate either increases or decreases in costs depending on how the EHR is used and the context in which it is used.

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News 6/20/13

From Guppy: “Re: KLAS scores. KLAS always seems to hand-pick the largest vendors as winners. It was interesting to look at the data you reported because it would appear that a number of the small, specialty-specific vendors do a much better job at usability than the big fish – shocking!”  “Usability” is not necessarily the same thing as customer satisfaction, which is the metric KLAS is measuring. Regardless, the KLAS scores always stir up plenty of controversy. At least in the ambulatory EMR segment, several of the smaller vendors did quite well, including PCC, SRS, and Sevocity.

The 110-provider Oregon Medical Group will implement Phytel’s Outreach, Insight, and Coordinate modules for population health management.

Technology could improve treatment outcomes for children with chronic illnesses, according to a report from Boston Children’s Hospital and the Verizon Foundation. The white paper stresses the need for technology that improves coordination among members of the care team; improves care management by providing appropriate data required for decision-making; facilitates the education of care team members on available resources; and incents providers to adopt technology that focuses on the patient and family rather than a traditional physician-centric model.

CMS publishes updated 2014 clinical quality measures for EPs, which are categorized based on the agency’s priorities for patient and family engagement, patient safety, care coordination, population health, efficient use of resources, and clinical effectiveness.

Yesterday I stopped by my optometrist’s office to pick up some contacts. While the tech was hunting for my order, he took a phone call. As I became increasingly impatient for him to get off the phone and finish helping me, another employee explained that the tech was talking to the doctor. When I finally walked out the door, I wondered to myself who should have been the tech’s priority: the customer/patient or the doctor?  Anyone?

Robert M. Wah, MD, the ONC’s first deputy national coordinator and a retired Navy captain, is named president-elect of the AMA.

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News 6/18/13

From RyanS: “Re: KLAS Mid-Term Report. Physician’s Computer Company earned the top customer satisfaction scores in both the ambulatory PM and EHR software categories.” The Mid-Term report is based on performance scores gathered over the previous 12 months. RyanS provided a few other highlights, including:

• PCC Partner PM (1-10 physicians) blew away the practice management competition with a score of 95; Epic Resolute/Prelude/Cadence (> 75 physicians) was next with a score of 88.7;  Greenway PrimeSuite Practice (11-75 physicians) was third at  88.6.
• Top performers in the ambulatory EMR segment were PCC EHR (1-10 physicians) with a score of 95.5; EpicCare Ambulatory (over 75 physicians) at 88.3; and SRSsoft EHR (11-75 physicians) at 86.7.
• Top clearinghouse providers were Navicure (92.3), ZirMed (92.5), Office Alley (91.1), and Practice Insight (90.1).
• KLAS recognized McKesson Practice Partner (11-75 physicians) as the product demonstrating the biggest improvement since its December, 2012 awards, jumping 13 percent to 56.7. AdvancedMD EHR (1-10 physicians) gained 12 percent to 76.2.

Vitera Healthcare Solutions announces that it has acquired Birmingham, AL-based SuccessEHS, which offers PM/EHR, electronic dental record, dental imaging, and revenue cycle solutions. SuccessEHS, which has doubled in size in the past two years, will be operated as a division of Vitera and expand Vitera’s user base to  10,500 organizations, 415,000 medical professionals, and 85,000 physicians.

CureMD offers discounted subscription rates, and free implementation, training, and data migration for the 4,400 users of the Mitochon Systems EHR platform. Last month Mitochon announced it was exiting the physician EHR market and would no longer market its free EHR product.

The office manager for Summersville Pediatrics (SC) shares her practice’s experience migrating from MyWay to Aprima Medical’s EMR with assistance from Aprima dealer ConXit Technology Group.

CareCloud hires Tom Cady (athenahealth) as VP of professional services.

Nature Coast ACO (FL) expands its relationship with eClinicalWorks to include eCW’s Care Coordination Medical Record.

Nuance releases a new version of Dragon Medical Practice designed for smaller practices that includes voice shortcuts to aid searches for medical information and more than 90 specialized medical vocabularies.

A computer outage in the Canadian province of Alberta caused about 202 medical clinics to lose access to patients’ health information for more than five hours last week. “Thousands” of patients were affected and many practices turned patients away. One physician told a local paper, “When this happens it cripples you. We didn’t even have Internet access. This is also a financial loss for physicians.” The EHR vendor blames the outage on a faulty network device that routes data to the clinics.

e-MDs relocates and expands its headquarters and will operate out of a 30,000 square foot administrative campus in Cedar Park, TX, a 40,600 square foot technology campus in Austin, TX, and a separate data center providing business continuity and disaster recovery services.

Vitera Healthcare releases Vitera Medical Manager EHR, a Web-based EHR, analytics, and transaction platform for current Vitera Medical Manager customs.

The primary motivator for becoming an ACO or PCMH is to improve patient outcomes, according to a survey by eClinicalWorks. Almost all respondents believe that an integrated EHR would be the most valuable HIT feature for an ACO or PCMH.

An MGMA report provides more evidence that ICD-10 readiness is moving slowly. The greatest concern is the lack of communication and critical coordination between physician practices and their EHR/PM/clearinghouse vendors  regarding software updates and testing. Less than five percent of practices report they have made significant progress when rating their overall readiness for ICD-10 implementation.

Emdeon acquires Goold Health Systems, a provider of pharmacy benefits and related services to state Medicaid agencies.

Forty-two percent of practicing physicians are dissatisfied with their jobs, leading many to consider leaving medicine and taking early retirement. Decreasing autonomy, low reimbursement, and administrative hassles were the key drivers of dissatisfaction.

The number of retail medical clinics is predicted to climb from 1,418 at the end of 2012 to 2,868 in 2015.

In an AAFP News interview, Farzad Mostashari, MD discusses EHRs, ROIs, productivity, improved patient care, and more. Regarding productivity:

If physicians just replicate the existing paper-based processes in a digital way, they probably are not going to get huge productivity gains. But if they redesign the care flow to designate what things are done by people versus what’s done through the EHR technology, then that really adds to productivity. That’s how I would summarize the experience of folks who have made EHR implementation a wonderful business decision.

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News 6/13/13

CMS releases the 2011 PQRS and e-Prescribing Incentive Program Experience Report, which includes the following highlights:

• The PQRS program paid 280,229 EPs a total of $262 million in incentives
• The eRx program paid 282,382 EPs a total of $285 million in incentives
• 135,931 EPs were subject to 2012 eRx payment adjustments because they did not meet the reporting requirements in the first half of 2011, or didn’t qualify for an exemption, or didn’t meet the exclusion criteria for the adjustment.

King’s Ridge Christian School (GA) becomes the first student health clinic to implement simplifyMD’s EHR software.

CureMD Healthcare will make Mitochon Systems’ clinical content platform available within its EHR. What is particularly interesting about this announcement is that last month Mitochon announced it was exiting the EHR market. The press release that Mitochon emailed me today suggests the company has a new business model, though its not reflected on its Website.

Physician compensation is increasingly tied to measures of quality and patient satisfaction according to an MGMA report on 2012 physician compensation. Quality metrics accounted for three percent of primary care physicians’ median compensation of $216,462 and two percent of specialists’ median compensation of $388,199.

Swedish Covenant Hospital (IL) selects eClinicalWorks EHR and RCM solutions for its 150 employed physicians with Swedish Covenant Medical Group.

The AHRQ publishes a guide for primary care practices connecting to RHIOs and addresses such topics as organizational readiness when connecting an EHR to a RHIO, clinician buy-in for information exchange, technical issues, and modifying clinician workflows.

EHRs have the potential to facilitate patient-physician communication and enhance collaboration according to an opinion piece published in JAMA. The physician-authors encourage clinicians to introduce the EHR in the exam room with a verbal explanation and invite patients to view the screen to review test results and other data:

“Self-motivated and empowered patients are likely to regard the invitation to view their electronic chart as an act of transparency that enhances the collaborative nature of the patient-physician relationship.”

As a “self-motivated and empowered” patient, I must agree. Last month I met with a specialist following a procedure. He spent most of the exam in front of the computer but I loved that he invited me to look at the photos he had taken of my esophagus (which confirmed my suspicion that my esophagus is not my best feature.)  I left feeling pretty good about my doctor and better informed about my health.

Piedmont Eye Center (VA) selects SRS EHR for its seven physicians.

Pulse Systems hires Samuel Ambrose (VeriTeQ) as chief marketing officer.

NextGen reseller ITelagen will market its support and services package with IMO Problem (IT) Terminology from Intelligent Medical Objects.

E-mail Inga.