Good news: as of January the nationwide EHR adoption rate for family physicians was at nearly 70%. The bad news is that non-adopters point to an increase in security risks for digital files as the reason why they continue to use paper health records.
But it’s actually paper records that leave your practice in serious threat of a security breach.
Would you allow someone with no previous dental experience perform a root canal on your son or daughter? Of course not.
Likewise, having an understanding of your practice’s workflows and processes is essential when selecting an EHR vendor. You’ll see it’s easier to recognize issues in advance and use procedural knowledge to choose the EHR features and functions that will streamline your workflow.
Prior to March, you could count on receiving your Meaningful Use incentive payment within 8 to 12 weeks of successful attestation. Not anymore. In March, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began conducting Meaningful Use prepayment audits, which will delay payments.
According to CMS, between 5% and 10% of attesting physicians will be chosen for prepayment auditing. This is in addition to the post-payment audits that CMS has conducted since 2012, which will continue to affect another 5% to 10% of physicians.
Too often, providers implement EHRs without taking full advantage of their revenue making potential.
If you didn’t get a chance to attend Tuesday’s ROI of EHR webinar, this month, we spoke on how to generate long lasting profits with your EHR software beyond the initial investment.
In the second installment of our EHR language series, we’ll take a look at Ruby, the backbone of our very own CareCloud Charts.
Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general purpose object-oriented programming language that combines rule sets from other languages like Perl, Eiffel, Lisp and Smalltalk.
Continue Reading…
In 2012, nearly two-thirds of primary care physicians in the United States used an EHR, up from 46% in 2009. That’s an impressive uptick considering the timeframe. But when compared to the EHR adoption rates of other highly developed countries, the U.S. still resides towards the back of the pack.
Included amongst the countries above the U.S. in terms of countrywide EHR adoption rates are the Netherlands at 98%, the U.K. at 97%, Australia at 92% and New Zealand at 97%. For a country as innovative and technologically advanced as the U.S., this gap is surprising.
Over the next three weeks we’ll look at the programming languages that have served as the backbone of EHRs through the years. It’s these languages that give EHRs the ability to function.
Today we kick the series off with MUMPS, the AARP-member of EHR programming languages.
Data thieves break into a small-town doctor’s system. They use advanced hacking methods to not only gain access to the healthcare information inside it, but make that data completely inaccessible for the provider. They steal the protected health information of the physicians’ patients, encrypt it, and post an electronic ransom note demanding that the doctor pay up to get the data back.
Gripping, right? It sounds like the plot of an action movie. I’d watch that.
But if the above scenario were to play out in movie form, the first words on big screens in theaters would be ‘Based on a True Story,’ because the tale of ‘Electronic Medical Records for Ransom’ actually took place earlier this year.
It’s that time of year again, when students and teachers head back to the classroom after eight to ten weeks off. For me, this late August period always invokes two distinct feelings: nostalgia (for those ‘good old days’) and motivation, spurred by the sense of new beginnings inherent to every fresh fall semester.
Healthcare and health IT aren’t so lucky as to have summers off, but there are still some major parallels between those industries and the U.S. school system. For starters, education in this country is subject to just as much scrutiny, just as much proposed reform and just as much criticism as healthcare is.
There’s no denying that they’re both flawed fields, but HIT could certainly learn a few valuable lessons from the education system in this ‘back to school’ moment.
If you’re counting on earning 2012 Meaningful Use incentives from Medicare, but have yet to implement an EHR system in your practice, your time is running out.
No, CMS hasn’t moved up the attestation deadline. You can file your attestation online on December 31 and still earn the maximum payout amount for 2012.