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.

E-mail Inga.

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.

E-mail Inga.

DOCtalk by Dr. Gregg 6/22/13

In the Kingdom of Happy Healthcare

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, Eric Henry Roberts V went looking for a wife. Since he was the prince of the entire Kingdom of Happy Healthcare, he knew he would be able to find a wonderful wife. What woman wouldn’t want to marry the handsome prince and share this wonderful kingdom from atop EHR Mountain within the glorious walls of EHR Castle, the grandest castle in all the land?

EHR Castle had been built by Eric’s great, great grandfather who was known as Pen. He ruled at a time when the land was rife with outlaws and hooligans. At that time, the kingdom was a vast jungle. It was divided into many small lands ruled by warlords and chieftains. None of them spoke in person with the others and they rarely shared. They were the kings of their parts of the jungle and, by a long-held and poorly understood tradition, they all wrote decrees to each other on parchment. Thus, they were known as the “Paper Lions.”

The Paper Lions’ paper decrees had many problems. They were, by tradition, the only way the various tribal leaders spoke with the nearby leaders, discussing treaties and the like, but they were often more trouble than treaty. Their papers were often lost, hard to read, or so poorly written that many a war was started over the years simply due to poor communication.

Pen was one of the Paper Lions, but he developed a bigger vision than his fellow chieftains. He saw the value of working more cooperatively with others outside of his clan. He knew that resources abounded in other areas of the jungle that he could not access. He knew, too, that he held riches within his domain that others would want. He was the first to step away from the Paper Lions and develop a new way of connecting with his fellow warlords. He developed “The Talk.”

Pen figured out a clever way to make messages between tribes more reliable. He strung a network of wires running through the jungle from tribe to tribe. They put their decrees and other inter-tribe messages into little holders and sent them careening through the trees on these long wire pathways. Messages got to where they were intended. Plus, he developed a standard message format that all tribe leaders agreed to use to insure that everyone could read and understand the messages. The fellow chieftains dubbed this system “The Talk.”

The Talk worked. As tribes communicated more effectively, barriers between them fell. They worked together more. They eventually grew together, taming their vast jungle and joining forces under the wise leadership of Pen.

Pen was crowned king of the entire land of Happy Healthcare and adopted the kingly name, Eric Henry Roberts. All the generations since have proudly carried the E.H.R. (version II, II,IV, etc.) moniker.

Now Eric Henry Roberts V needed a wife. The word went out and many a comely woman aspired to his attentions. However, just as he was setting his sights upon the loveliest and gentlest among them, the Kingdom of Happy Healthcare was attacked by neighboring enemies. The attack was fierce and all of Prince Eric’s advisors beseeched him to use his Solomon-esque skills to assuage the enemy. Eric knew what he had to do.

The marauders were from the Land of Efficient Healthcare; they had long argued with their Happy Healthcare neighbors to the north. Eric knew that the ruler of their enemy was a good woman, though she had grown up indoctrinated with family values, values that included a longstanding feud mindset with the Kingdom of Happy Healthcare. No one even remembered what had started the feud, but it has burned ever more hotly through the years as Eric’s predecessors had driven the improvements and camaraderie within their kingdom. Now they had invaded. They were envious of what the E.H.R.s had built.

Eric also knew that the Queen of the Land of Efficient Healthcare had accomplished many of the same feats he and his forebears had; she had banded together disparate tribes within their land and brought peaceful coexistence and prosperity through cooperation and enhanced inter-tribal communication.

He also knew she had an exquisite daughter.

Prince Eric sent a special envoy to Queen Eleanor. The envoy rode non-stop to deliver the message. Eric had used the same message protocol that his great, great grandfather had established years ago with the warlords. His hope was that the message clarity would insure accurate communications between the leaders, just as it had done so many years ago.

This fact was not lost on Queen Eleanor. She understood and she accepted Prince Eric’s proposal; she dispatched her beautiful daughter the very next day.

Queen Eleanor’s daughter arrived in the Kingdom of Happy Healthcare within a fortnight. She dutifully married the handsome Prince Eric the very next day. The warring nations were now joined by royal matrimony and peace was declared.

As the newlyweds retired to the royal bedchambers on their honeymoon night, they noticed that the maidservants had arranged the boudoir with all of the new couple’s personalized accoutrements. One among them stood out to both Eric and his lovely new bride: monogrammed pillow cases with the initials “E.H.R.” on them.

The new bride looked surprised and apologized to her new husband, “My lord, I most humbly beg your forgiveness. My servants have snubbed thee and for that I beg thy mercy.”

Eric was perplexed. “Why sayeth thou so, dear wife?” he asked.

“My ladies in waiting have placed only my pillows upon our bridal bed. They have neglected your royal highness’ seal,” she replied.

Said Eric, “But, dear bride, these are my marks. I fear they have neglected thine.”

Suddenly, as the awareness dawned upon him, Eric realized he knew not the full name of his betrothed. “Beloved,” he asked, “pray, tell me thy fullest name.”

“Why, Eleanor Hermione Rothwell, of course. The same as my mother, and her mother before her, and her mother before her,” she answered. “It is a proud maternal tradition of our land.”

“Aw,” said the goodly prince. “Now ‘tis clear. I see we are both well represented in our chambers as I am Eric Henry Roberts V. The royal ‘E.H.R.’ monograms connect us both.“

Eleanor smiled when Eric then strode toward her with a knowing (and not exactly royal) twinkle in his eye and said, “Let us now connect two lands, two peoples, and two E.H.R.s!”

The moral of the story? When EHRs connect, Happy and Efficient Healthcare finally get it on!

From the trenches…

“To the royal guards of this realm, we are all victims in-waiting.” – Cheshire Cat

Dr. Gregg Alexander, a grunt in the trenches pediatrician at Madison Pediatrics, is Chief Medical Officer for Health Nuts Media, an HIT and marketing consultant, and sits on the board of directors of the Ohio Health Information Partnership (OHIP).

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.

E-mail Inga.

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.

E-mail Inga.