News 2/17/15

Top News

HHS extends the February 15 deadline for open enrollment sign-ups to February 22 for anyone who started but was unable to complete registration on Healthcare.gov. As expected (by me, anyway), a last-minute rush to sign up for coverage caused long call-center wait times and back-end technical issues, including problems verifying applicant incomes. Several state-run exchanges, including California and New York, have extended their deadlines as well.

Webinar

February 17 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. Cloud Computing – Cyber-Security Considerations. Sponsored by Sensato. Presenter: John Gomez, CEO, Sensato. This webinar will examine the security challenges involved when healthcare organizations implement cloud-based services.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Bill Frist, MD chats with Marcus Osborne, vice president of health and wellness payer relations at Wal-Mart Stores, during a Nashville Health Care Council. Osborne explained that though the company’s retail clinic strategy is its smallest play in healthcare, it is also the fastest emerging. The clinics, which are now in three markets, follow a primary care model and may sometime in the future incorporate mobile or telehealth components.

Tech startup veteran Tom Higley kicks off the 10.10.10 program in Denver to bring together 10 successful business launchers to meet for 10 days to tackle 10 of healthcare’s biggest problems. Participants include Xerox, Kaiser Permanente, and the Colorado Health Foundation. Higley, who envisions modeling the program for other industries like energy and education, is confident several new companies will be launched in the coming months as a direct result of 10.10.10 conversations.

Fortune profiles eClinicalWorks , which has grown without venture capital and is run by co-founders who placed their ownership in trusts so that none of them can cash in their shares or try to take the company public. CEO Girish Navani told the reporter, “I don’t need to be the richest man in Massachusetts,” adding that employees like profit-sharing cash even more than stock options since “they can buy stock in Apple.”

Announcements and Implementations

After a year of planning, Laguna Beach Community Clinic (CA) goes live on an Epic system hosted by Oregon Coastal Health Information Network. Associate Medical Director Jorge Rubal, MD attributes the new system not only to OCHIN, but to financial donations received from the Assistance League, families, and hundreds of individual donations. While Rubal seems enthusiastic about the clinic’s new technology, it seems to highlight the almost oppressive Meaningful Use hoops small practices have to jump through to get new IT up and running.

Cerner enlists the services of Cloudera to power its data hub. The new infrastructure, powered by Hadoop, has already enabled Cerner clients to determine the probability of patient bloodstream infections. “Our clients are reporting that the new system has actually saved hundreds of lives by being able to predict if a patient has sepsis more effectively than they could before," says Ryan Brush, senior director and distinguished engineer.

Practice Fusion launches Online Patient Check In, a move the company anticipates will help it eliminate a quarter billion pages of paper in 2015.

PerfectServe signed 29 new client contracts and had 260 go-lives in 2014, with 45,000 clinicians using its communications platform. 

Telemedicine

The American Telemedicine Association announces that “the world’s richest doctor,” Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, will keynote its annual meeting and tradeshow, which will take place May 2-5 in Los Angeles. I wonder if the whistleblower lawsuit brought against him last month by two disgruntled NantHealth employees will again rear its ugly (and inconvenient) head as the ATA meeting kicks off.

The local paper profiles the Central Alabama Veterans Health Care System and its Telehealth Education Delivered truck, which is making stops around the state to raise awareness of the telemedicine services available to veterans. CAVHCS saw 1,600 telemedicine patients last year, with many of those taking advantage of mental health services.

Government and Politics

Senate Democrats in Connecticut propose privacy legislation that would mandate healthcare companies to require encryption technologies. Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D-Norwalk) believes (somewhat erroneously) that such a mandate would have prevented the Anthem breach. As John Gomez of Sensato pointed out during last week’s HIStalk webinar dissecting the Anthem hack, there’s only so much you can do when trying to protect yourself against criminals who are willing to wait months, if not years, to find a way to slip in to your network via compromised passwords.

GAO is accepting nominations through February 27 for openings on the HIT Policy Committee in the areas of consumers, providers, health plans, and quality reporting.

Research and Innovation

Cyrcadia Health develops the iTbra, which uses a series of embedded temperature sensors, along with an algorithm and app, to detect breast cancer in women with dense breast tissue. CEO Rob Royea believes the sports-bra-like wearable can detect cancer earlier and better than a mammogram. He hopes to achieve FDA approval so that physicians can offer it in place of mammograms, and consumers can eventually use it in place of monthly self-checks.

Researchers at Michigan State University work on developing a technology that will use fingerprint recognition to track vaccinations and other medical record data. “It’s pretty simple,” says MSU Professor Anil Jain, “all it takes is one scan of your fingerprint to pull up your health records and vaccination schedule. So we keep track of who has been vaccinated and who has received the proper dosage.”

A Professional Association of Health Care Office Management study finds that the total cost of ICD-10 conversion for a small practice is around $8,167. Over 275 practices were surveyed about the cost of ICD-10 manuals and documentation, training costs, software system upgrades, bill conversion costs, and staff time spent on implementation. I find that figure surprisingly low given that other studies have shown that implementation can cost small practices between $56,000 and $226,000.

University of Pennsylvania researchers discuss people’s propensity to trust their own guesses or another person’s conclusions over facts based on algorithmically analyzed data – a method of decision-making that may not always work in their best interests. “Even if, in certain domains, people have learned to use a model or an algorithm, [consider when] you’re making an important life decision,” says researcher Berkeley Dietvorst. “Let’s say you’re in the hospital. Do you want to trust the doctor or a computer about whether to get surgery? That [trust] might not carry over. So this is one of those things where even if people can learn it for their job or in a certain domain, it might not carry over to other domains in their life.”

Other

Cambridge, MA-based EHR company Vecna Technologies will host a 5K run for humans, and has extended an invitation to local robots that care to compete in a 100-meter-dash. “We were thinking, ‘What kind of flavor can we have here?’ explains cofounder Deborah Theobald, “and, you know, robots is so obvious.” One of the first to sign up for the dash is vGo, a camera-carrying telepresence robot on wheels that lets people remotely navigate an office space or hospital while interacting with people through its display screen.

The local paper profiles Todd Forman, MD a Long Beach, CA-based physician who combined pre-med studies at Harvard with summers on the road as a saxophonist for Sublime before going into family medicine full time. “In my private practice, which I’ve been in nine years, as a family physician, what I love about it is you say ‘What’s wrong?’ and being exposed to punk rockers and other forms of art, it opens your mind and senses up in a way where you don’t judge,” says Forman. “I’m much more approachable, able to get things out of people, able to describe problems and I love that about family medicine.”

General surgeon Jeffrey Singer, MD writes in the Washington Post that the Meaningful Use program has harmed patients more than it has helped, lowering quality of care and causing costs to rise. “[E]nding the mandatory electronic-health-record program should be a plank in the Republican Party’s health-care agenda,” Singer advocates. “For all the good intentions of the politicians who passed them, electronic health records have harmed my practice and my patients.”

Sponsors Update

• Medicity puts together “A Year in Review” that offers a snapshot of its 2014 accomplishments.
• Healthwise wins international awards for two of its health videos.
• Lynn Schep asks in the SRS “EMR Straight Talk” blog if the MU prayers of providers will be answered thanks to a potentially shortened reporting period.
• Perceptive Software’s “In Context” blog features a piece on “Hybrid Cloud: Concept vs. Market.”
• Nordic’s Abby Polich offers tips on “Extending Your EHR: Preparing for Success.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

News 2/12/15

Top News

CMS releases new Meaningful Use numbers that will likely do nothing to instill confidence in physicians preparing for Stage 2 or even optimistically (or naively) looking ahead to Stage 3. Nearly 37,000 of the half-a-million MU-registered providers had attested to Stage 2 by February 1. That’s an increase of 4,000 since the end of last year. On the payments side, penalties have begun for the estimated 257,000 doctors and other providers who didn’t attest in 2013. Thirty-four percent of the CMS penalties assessed to providers who fail to meet MU criteria this year amount to $250 or less.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

If you’re heading to HIMSS in April, t’s time to sign up to attend HIStalkapalooza on April 13 at the House of Blues in Chicago. The “I want to come” form is open, so don’t waste time in applying. Mr. H will close the submission window soon. This year will mark my fourth time as a party-goer, with each event getting successively better in terms of networking, fashions, and fun. Thankfully, Mr. H didn’t mess with a good thing and has brought back Party on the Moon to help us all let loose on the dance floor. He’s cooking up some fun things for our annual HISsies Awards, too.

We’ve emailed HIStalk Practice sponsors about our HIMSS networking reception on Sunday, April 12. Email Lorre if you have yet to see that email cross your inbox and would like to come.

Webinars

February 13 (Friday) 2:00 ET. Inside Anthem: Dissecting the Breach. Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenter: John Gomez, CEO, Sensato. The latest intelligence about the Anthem breach will be reviewed to provide a deep understanding of the methods used, what healthcare organizations can learn from it, and how to determine if a given organization has come under similar attacks. Attendees will be able to ask questions and put forth their own thoughts.

Announcements and Implementations

The Michigan Center for Effective IT Adoption reaches its goal of helping 3,742 EPs attest to Meaningful Use. The fifth largest REC in the country, M-CEITA has helped physicians across the state realize over $80 million in incentive payments.

Azalea Health adds pre-authorization services to its line of EHR product and billing services.

Imprivata launches Confirm ID, which supports DEA-mandated policies for electronic prescribing of controlled substances.

Merge Healthcare announces that users of its iConnect Network will be able to transmit and receive imaging orders and results to Emdeon Clinical Exchange users.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Advisory Board Company acquires Clinovations for an undisclosed amount. Clinovations, a consulting firm out of Washington, D.C., will join Advisory Board Consulting and Management, a Tennessee-based division of ABC with a focus on healthcare organizations.

People

Personalized medicine analytics vendor Kyron names Jacob Reider, MD (ONC) as chief strategy officer.

The National Patient Safety Foundation appoints Donald Berwick, MD (Institute for Healthcare Improvement) and Kaveh Shojania, MD (Centre for Quality and Improvement and Patient Safety) co-chairs of its new expert panel, which will will review advances in patient safety and develop strategic recommendations for future focus.

Telemedicine

This article highlights CaptureProof, a HIPAA-compliant solution through which patients and physicians can communicate via photo and video sharing. CEO Meghan Conroy explains that the company, which has raised $1.4 million so far, is conducting 10 pilot programs in a variety of healthcare environments.

California Telehealth Network selects Safety Net Connect as a partner for its  eConsult telemedicine system for primary care. CTN is working to expand telemedicine training and support for rural and medically underserved clinics and hospitals across the state.

Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, GA becomes the first in the state to offer its nursing students certification in the use of telemedicine technology. Nearby Tift Regional Medical Center is partnering with the program to provide telemedicine equipment. ABAC is also working to integrate the technology into its own student health center.

Government and Politics

The New York Times calls out little-noticed White House budget language that urges Congress to eliminate the financial incentive for hospitals to buy physician practices so they can charge more for delivering the same services to patients.

On a related note, open data company Socrata develops the Open Budget app, which takes the 2016 U.S. budget and plots it into interactive graphs and charts. It comes as no surprise that HHS is visually the highest funded department at $1.09 trillion.

Seventeen medical associations write a 35-page letter to CMS detailing their disdain for a proposed rule that would require Medicare ACOs to describe plans, including yearly milestones or performance targets,  for using IT to better coordinate care. "CMS efforts to micromanage the way ACOs utilize information technology are more likely to hinder these efforts than support them," the authors write.

Research and Innovation

University of Pennsylvania researchers find that smartphone apps are just as accurate as wearables when it comes to accurately counting steps. The most accurate devices were the Fitbit Flex, One, and Zip. The Nike FuelBand reported step counts more than 20-percent lower than observed.

Other

Fast Company profiles several companies getting into the business of developing social education networks for healthcare professionals. Toronto-based Figure 1 has created one that allows users to share medical images. Oregon-based ReelDx has developed a platform through which physicians can upload and comment on videos of procedures and conditions. Figure 1 founder Joshua Landy notes that quick sharing of images among physicians is commonplace, and that much of his company’s value add has been through building a taxonomy for the imagery along with an easy, safe, and legal way of accessing it.

Sponsor Updates

• Clockwise.MD announces that nearly 1 million patients have been seen through its Web-based appointment reservation tool.
• PerfectServe announces unprecedented growth in 2014, with 29 new clients and over 260 go lives.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

HIStalk Practice Interviews Joseph Cohen, MD CEO, kiddoEMR

Joseph Cohen, MD is a physician at Cedar Park Pediatrics (TX) and CEO of kiddoEMR.

Tell me about yourself and the company.
Cedar Park Pediatrics began using an EHR in 2005. After nine years of rising cost and limited functionality, we began the funding to develop our own EHR. It had to cater directly to pediatrics and be cost effective. In February 2014, kiddoEMR went live with 2,7000+ imported records and 5,000+ active patient charts. Since that time, we have undergone three major updates that added functionality and implemented bug fixes. We are in the process of launching our HIE to CPP and the 164 practice clients we currently serve. We expect a debug and a HIE release candidate by April. We are also implementing the kiddoEMR portal domain for our patients, which offers them HIPAA-compliant kiddoEMR.com G-mail, and G-drive, further reducing the cost of communication and care for our patients.

Basically, kiddoEMR is the direct result of my experience. The rising cost of business infrastructure is outpacing any rise in reimbursement to doctors. The alarming trend of increased practice closure is a direct result. I owe my patients too much, and I didn’t want to close. Having cancer in 2009 didn’t help my situation either, but my patients stood by me. I owed them another try at keeping their medical home going. When I was sick, I always had dinner, or a card or a crayon picture waiting for me at work. It was a sense of family that overwhelmed me with loyalty to my patients. I knew great developers and we came up with kiddoEMR. It saved my practice and my career as a private-practice pediatrician.

How many customers/site installs do you currently have?
We are at 164 offices nationwide serving over 250 individual physicians and their staff.

What do physicians like best about this particular technology?
They love that it’s super customizable and reliable, and that there’s no more need for support from an IT firm. They also appreciate the BYOD policy that goes with it, and that they get great care value for the cost. It’s built for Chrome, and so secure remote access is key for our physicians.

What have they told you was lacking in their previous EHRs?
No pediatric support, unable to document with photos. They said they had no care value for the price of the platforms they were using. It cost too much for too little. Most of all, physicians said how much they hated the way in which EHRs have forced them to change the way they diagnose, and the way their office runs to satisfy the software. We believe that it should be the opposite, and we started our system with agile architecture to realize that goal.

Is kiddoEMR certified for Meaningful Use?
We are a platform agnostic, thin client,  hybrid product using OpenEMR base code through an open-source license. We have applied our proprietary overlay code to make it secure, customizable, and functional for pediatrics. OpenEMR is CCHIT MU1 certified, with the MU2 updates currently being analyzed for certification.

What is your opinion of MU? Is Cedar Park Pediatrics participating?
We do not participate by choice. We found too much red tape to make that a cost-effective project. Our old EHR didn’t even give us the capability of running the right reports, so it would have taken weeks of time.

I call it “Meaningless Use.” It shows in the statistics that only 1.1 percent of EHR doctors have adopted MU2 updates. That speaks volumes to the lack of value MU guidelines have provided for physicians. I know one thing – MU1 and 2 has only raised the price of EHR platforms. I get upset when other industries do a money grab in medicine. There is this impression that we are making loads of cash, and we just aren’t.

Given your enthusiasm for healthcare technology, what is your opinion of ONC’s plans for interoperability in the coming years?
While I tend to be skeptical of government involvement in industry, it is clear that current EHRs have no intention of being interoperable natively. They charge a paywall to physicians to get some limited interoperability. That is unacceptable. KiddoEMR data is granular and processor driven. Our architecture is agile and not waterfall. This gives us the ability to use data across ANY system ANYwhere. We keep our granular data encrypted on the drive level for the privacy of our patients.

How is your practice leveraging Google Glass? How is that experience translating to kiddoEMR product development?
I was invited to the Explorer program in July of 2013, and quickly saw it as important as my stethoscope. I could document visual diagnosis instantly. KiddoEMR supports documentation with Glass natively and allows our doctors to document securely with pictures from Glass in real time. It is an immense time saver and adds tremendous care value to our platform. The notes are brilliant and informative. Think medical atlas and not encyclopedia. There is no going back after supporting the visual diagnosis natively.

Given that you have experienced healthcare as a patient, how have you seen technology such as EHRs improve patient care (or not)?
I am a Stage 4b Hodgkin’s Lymphoma survivor. I went into remission just over five years ago. My original doctors were not using EHRs at that time, but my chemo regimen team and the pharmacist were. I eventually switched oncologists to one who was (for other reasons), and even back then I felt like it was helping me. The nurses, reception, and billing all had their respective access to my chart in real time. It was a time saver.

Since then, I find the patient portal my PMD offers to be lackluster. It is this experience that has spawned our robust HIE. I wanted our HIE portal to be more like a health dashboard and less like DOS.

What are your future plans for the company?
My goal in the end is to provide care for EVERY child, not just the ones that can afford pricey hardware. In addition, I want to relieve the pediatrician of infrastructure costs that are killing private practice and small clinics. If the pediatrician has his few supplies (tongue blades, strep tests, etc.) and a full secure and functional platform behind him like kiddoEMR, why can’t he do house calls all day? Why can’t he see patients on the way home? I do.

Compared to the average costs of implementation of other EHRs, we can do more at one-tenth the starting price for every pediatrician, and in turn provide free access to every child. The result would be a real time, secure, omnipresent platform that has real meaning. Never again will an ER doctor have to practice medicine “in the dark.” With kiddoEMR, his patient’s information is available in real time, immediately. ALL of it. Anytime.

Our current offering is based on an enterprise model to serve facilities remotely. Our final platform will be a cloud-hosted service leveraging HIPAA-compliant, private-cloud architecture and omnipresent capabilities linking all consented and emergency facilities to accurate, real-time data.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

News 2/10/15

Top News

Fallout from the Anthem hack continues: Patient Privacy Rights and Consumer Watchdog representatives write a letter to Cal INDEX, the health information database created by Anthem and Blue Shield of California, demanding that consumers be allowed to opt-in to the HIE rather than opt-out due to the shaky privacy policies currently in place. The authors contend that:

1. Consumers still do not have a real right to opt out. Although you agree to not share the information of a consumer who opts out, you intend to continue collecting and entering that person’s information into the database, and consumers will not have a right to delete that information.
2. Cal INDEX does not plan to give consumers access to their entire record until a patient portal is developed at some unidentified time in the future. This places patient health at risk by increasing the likelihood that a medical provider relies on a file that is incorrect.

“Consumer Watchdog and Patient Privacy Rights are always suspicious when health insurance companies create programs they say are for consumers’ benefit,” the writers explain, “yet make participation mandatory. Health information exchanges that give consumers control of their own information can offer real benefits for patients’ health, but Anthem and Blue Shield presumptively signed up their customers for Cal INDEX before adequate protections were in place.”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

In a timely move, the Center for Innovative Technology invests in Ostendio Inc., a startup that provides information security and privacy compliance solutions to digital health companies via its MyVirtualComplianceManager platform. Ostendio CEO Grant Elliott was behind Voxiva’s Text4baby and Text2quit mobile solutions.

DigiSight Technologies raises $7.8 million in Series B financing from new and existing investors including Biosys Capital, Waycross Ventures, GE Ventures, and Lagunita LLC. The company’s DigiSight Network creates a secure connection for data from mobile devices to move into clinical settings. The company plans to focus its commercialization strategy on ophthalmology.

The Massachusetts Competitive Partnership works to make the state a mecca for digital health technology. The group of 16 influential CEOs and business leaders are looking at financing, mentoring, and incubator space, as well as contemplating a push for a tax credit to persuade angel investors to provide seed money. The private-sector group is working with Leerink Partners to set up a private equity fund that would invest in Massachusetts-based digital health companies.

Announcements and Implementations

Medical Associates of Navarro County (TX) goes live on the ImmTrac Texas Immunization Registry after successful interface testing with its EHR.

Frontier Behavioral Health (WA) selects the CoCentrix Coordinated Care Platform as its EHR and care management tool in an effort to connect its 15 behavioral health service lines with its 500 end users.

The Utah Health Information Network selects Applied PilotFish Healthcare Integration’s eiPlatform and eiConsole for Healthcare products to power its health claims data clearinghouse.

Government and Politics

A new GAO report indicates that the switch to ICD-10 will happen on October 1, citing efforts undertaken by Medicare to address concerns about the conversion. The report, which stems from interviews with 28 stakeholders over six months, also indicates that CMS has been proactive, too. The agency has been busy developing educational materials for providers and payers, conducting outreach including in-person training for physician practices, initiating end-to-end testing, and consulting focus groups.

Telemedicine

Crain’s profiles telemedicine startup Helix, which provides video consults with physicians and cloud-based access to medical records via a $75 monthly membership fee. "We’re both a health care technology company and a health care provider," says founder Les Hedman. "It’s a little confusing." Hedman and partner Lizzie Nolan self-funded the company, which is working with four physician groups and will likely begin marketing to Medicare patients living in rural and remote areas.

Senator Aaron Bean (R-Fernandina Beach) pokes fun at the sluggish progress of passing telemedicine legislation in Florida at the Florida Health Care Affordability Summit: “I’m not going to say Florida is behind the times but I just went to my healthcare provider a couple of weeks ago and they suggested I do some blood letting and they pulled out some leeches and I felt much better.” A bipartisan group of state House and Senate leaders have expressed confidence the legislation will finally pass this year.

Lawmakers in Oregon are also pushing for passage of legislation that would provide health insurance coverage to patients who receive telemedicine care. Oregon law currently requires coverage of telemedicine only if it takes place at a medical facility. Senate Bill 144 could expand that coverage, allowing people to see a doctor or nurse via two-way video conferencing.

Senator Bill Frist, MD advocates for broadened telemedicine legislation in Tennessee in light of the looming physician shortage in primary care: “As a doctor from a family of doctors, I am well aware that our profession has traditionally balked at change, especially when it involves new technology that alters how we interact with our patients. But the evidence is in from study after study. Telemedicine works. It is affordable and convenient for the patient. It expands access to excellent care to every community and every neighborhood across the state. If we want to continue to be a state that boasts a "health care capital" in our capital city of Nashville, we and our elected officials need to honor where medicine has been while embracing where it is going.”

Research and Innovation

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation offers grants ranging from $200,000 to $400,000 to non-profits and public entities conducting studies related to population health or the development of resources to help consumers make healthcare decisions. A total of $1.9 million will be awarded to between five and nine studies. Proposals are due March 3.

Rumors abound that med device company Dexcom has integrated its implantable glucose monitors with the iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple Watch demos of the Dexcom app for diabetes patients have displayed only glucose readings, though other features such as alarms and calibration might be in the works.

People

Tony Scott (VMware) is named chief information officer of the United States, replacing Steve VanRoekel.

DJ Patil (RelateIQ) joins the White House as a data scientist in residence, where he will focus on helping to handle healthcare data.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital President and Harvard Medical School Professor Elizabeth Nable, MD takes a side job with the NFL as chief medical advisor.

Russ Thomas (Availity) joins the Connecture Inc. Board of Directors.

Other

Grant-funded Vermont Information Technology Leaders pitches its new HIE to consumers by running regional Super Bowl ads on local TV stations at a cost of around $13,000 of its $195,000 marketing campaign. The move did not sit well with Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin: “Many Vermonters joined me in being disappointed that state and federal funds were being used for an advertising buy during the Super Bowl,” he said. “This should highlight the need for the Green Mountain Care Board to regulate VITL’s expenditures.” GMCB is an independent group created by the Vermont legislature charged with ensuring that changes in the state’s health system improve quality while stabilizing costs.

The National Committee for Quality Assurance seeks early adopters for its Patient-Centered Connected Care Recognition program. It will evaluate sites that deliver outpatient healthcare on their ability to communicate effectively with a patient’s other physicians, especially those in primary care.

Medical residents and fellows get a dose of reality at the Understanding the Business of Medicine Conference in Buffalo, N.Y. Attendees familiarized themselves with the financial, regulatory, IT, and customer-service challenges they’ll likely encounter upon joining a medical group or starting a practice. Buffalo urology resident John Bodkin III MD expressed his need for the day-long business school: “If I’m going to be up at night, I don’t want it to have to be for, ‘Oh, did I code that wrong? Am I going to get audited? Am I going to get paid for my time? Am I going to be able to afford my daughter’s wedding?’”

The Henn-na Hotel, opening this summer in Nagasaki, Japan, will feature blinking and “breathing” robots that make eye contact, respond to body language, and speak four languages fluently. They will check in guests, carry bags, make coffee, clean rooms, and deliver laundry. Could healthcare facilities in the U.S. be far behind? I wonder if patient satisfaction scores relating to customer service would plummet or soar.

Sponsor Updates

• A PerfectServe guest blog by physician collaboration expert Kenneth Cohn, MD addresses “The What and Why of Physician Engagement.”
• Senior VP Molly Mettler advocates for giving family caregivers a break in the latest Healthwise blog.
• Medicity offers a recap of the HL7 conference that showcased FHIR as the “next big thing” in healthcare.
• NVoq Director of Healthcare Industry Solutions Chad Hiner, RN explains why “EMR adoption will require more than financial carrots.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

From the Consultant’s Corner 2/10/15

Gauging Patient Access Performance
A Key Step in Readying Your Practice for the Future

Patient access is at the center of the evolving healthcare environment, as it sets the stage for the entire healthcare experience. When done well, the patient access function offers opportunities to enhance patient engagement, physician and resource productivity, and care management programs. Each of these benefits translates to elevated financial performance for the physician practice, regardless of size.

Progressive healthcare providers are rapidly realizing the importance of efficient and effective patient access in managing patient care, improving patient retention, and remaining competitive in terms of attracting new patients. Yet, practices may not understand how they can affect meaningful change in this area.

Key Questions to Determine Patient Access Performance
In my experience, the first step is to carefully assess current patient-access processes from the initial appointment request (whether over the phone or electronically through a patient portal) through check in, the clinical encounter, check out, and ongoing patient engagement. This allows a physician practice to identify areas of strength and improvement opportunities, discovering ways to create efficient and reliable workflows that better equip the practice to lower administrative costs while enhancing patient care, satisfaction, and payment. Practices can use the following questions to guide the assessment process.

1. How are metrics used to measure productivity and performance? Performance metrics are not new to practice management; however, the inter-relationship of patient access, clinical productivity, and revenue cycle metrics provides a holistic view of true practice performance. For example, one client of ours faced an unfortunate situation with excessively long appointment wait times, and provider productivity well below expected RVU production. Understanding the linkage of these metrics drove modifications to the practice’s scheduling templates that reduced wait times and improved the patient experience, provider productivity, and practice revenues.

2. Is there consistency in patient access across all entry points? Inconsistent or redundant processes can create patient and staff frustration and inefficiencies, and compromise data quality, resulting in downstream denials. Taking the time to identify and replace variations in workflows with standardized policies, procedures, and workflows provides significant improvements in terms of the patient experience, data quality, and resource productivity. This standardization should be based on best practices personalized to support each organization’s overall objectives. Once standardized processes are in place, be sure to provide the necessary education and training to front desk staff to help them perform consistently and deliver a seamless patient experience. Lastly, ensure appropriate feedback across the practice to monitor performance and to hold people accountable.

3. How do you collect patient payments? Failure to collect payment at the time of service slows the revenue cycle and causes the practice to incur additional expense to collect the payment later. Developing strategies for obtaining patient payment is especially important in the current climate, where patients are shouldering more financial responsibility. Improvement strategies should incorporate solutions to proactively identify patient responsibility before delivery of care. This shifts financial discussions to the front end, allowing staff to communicate with the patient in person or via the telephone about his or her payment responsibility. By communicating patient responsibility prior to the visit, the practice can achieve greater transparency, boosting both patient satisfaction and the likelihood of payment. For some practices, the shift toward patient collections represents a departure from previous strategies. To ensure a smooth transition, you should provide robust training so staff can interpret available financial information and be empowered to ask for payment in a patient-friendly manner.

There is no question that current industry changes have major implications for patients and practices. In this context, practices that take a proactive approach toward improving patient access can enhance operational efficiencies and clinical quality while also increasing patient satisfaction and driving revenue, ultimately laying the groundwork for future success.

Brad Boyd is vice president of sales and marketing for Culbert Healthcare Solutions.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.