Reflections from the HIMSS/AMDIS Physicians' IT Symposium at #HIMSS13

I am in New Orleans attending the 2013 HIMSS conference. Follow updates on Twitter by following the #HIMSS13 hashtag.

Today, I was in the HIMSS/AMDIS Physicians' IT Symposium: Reviewing the Past, Assessing the Present and Planning for the Future. Let me highlight a few key points and reflections I jotted down as I sat through several presentations about Meaningful Use (MU) and the future of clinical informatics:

Health IT is about improving clinical workflow efficiency and patient care. The HITECH Act was signed in 2009. How far have we come? New laws and regulations are forcing physicians and hospitals to change. They may not want to change, but they have no choice. The carrot and the stick approach is driving people to buy systems and force changes in workflow. Are these changes all beneficial for patients? Not necessarily. Some are clearly going to help patients as physicians rely on evidence-based information when they make clinical decisions. We should see a reduction in medical errors. Medication tracking and reconciliation will be easier. But, are we actually improving patient care? Or, are we putting too much emphasis on achieving Meaningful Use?

We've seen many physicians and hospitals achieve Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 1. Now, we are hearing growing discussions around Stage 2. It's probably a good thing that Stage 2 was delayed to 2014.

Meaningful Use Education Module: Transitions of Care

What do you know about  Stage 2 Meaningful Use around Transitions of Care?

From the ONC:

Reflecting our continued commitment to expand the Stage 2 / 2014 Edition meaningful use education portfolio beyond webinars and speaking events, today ONC is launching a a brand new self-paced education module on the "transitions of care" interoperability criteria. ONC and CMS staff created the module in response to stakeholder questions about the objective’s measurement requirements and valid certification approaches. The new education module can be viewed on HealthIT.gov at the following link:

http://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/video/meaningful-use-education-module-transitions-care

The Stage 2 EHR meaningful-use final rule is out!

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today released final requirements for Stage 2 Electronic Health Records Incentive programs.

The regulations can be found at:

• CMS - http://www.ofr.gov/OFRUpload/OFRData/2012-21050_PI.pdf
• ONC - http://www.ofr.gov/OFRUpload/OFRData/2012-20982_PI.pdf

A fact sheet on CMS's final rule is available at http://www.cms.gov/apps/media/fact_sheets.asp.

A fact sheet on ONC's standards and certification criteria final rule is available at http://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/meaningful-use-stage-2-0.

@Farzad_ONC delivers keynote today at #HIMSS12

This morning, Farzad Mostashari (@Farzad_ONC), the National Coordinator for Health IT, gave a keynote here at the HIMSS Conference. He gave an update on the progress that CMS is making and emphasized that health care improvement will come slowly and incrementally. We must work together to focus on population health management. The use of IT will be essential. Already, there are many eligible providers who have received the financial incentives tied to meaningful use, but we have a long way to go.

2012 should be a very interesting year as more physicians and hospitals learn to use health IT more effectively. We'll see more e-prescribing, more clinical decision support, and more sharing of health information. HIEs will make this possible as more states implement strategies to improve population health management.

HIMSS12 coverage is sponsored by HP. HP’s extensive portfolio of products, solutions, services and relationships can help your healthcare organization achieve quality business practices and provide quality patient care.

drchrono Releases New Product Bundle; Free E-Prescribing Now Available

Free Electronic Health Record App Offers Full Functionality for Achieving Meaningful Use Without Capital Investment in Software

Mountain View, CA – September 22, 2011 - drchrono, provider of the most comprehensive Patient Care Platform for the iPad, today announced a new product bundle for its Electronic Health Record (EHR) offering, which now includes free e-prescribing and additional medical companion tools to improve clinical workflow while enhancing quality of care for patients. With free e-prescribing, the complete functionality required for a physician practice to qualify for Meaningful Use incentives is now free from drchrono.

iHT2 Health IT Summit in New York City

iHT2 Health IT Summit in New York City – September 20-21, 2011 – The Westin New York at Times Square

Join over 200 CIO’s, VP’s, and Directors of IT from hospitals, health systems, and physician practices and:

1. Discover the latest trends and investment opportunities in the healthcare information technology sector.
2. Explore how quickly health IT is coming of age in addition to investor outlook given current macros
and micro industry indicators.
3. Collaborate and network with investors, executives, and entrepreneurs from across the finance and healthcare industry.

A simple "meaningful use" table that outlines and defines the core and menu set measures for EPs

When you search on the CMS website for information about the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs), you'll get bombarded by a ton of links (some which don't work) and 276 pages describing the meaningful use rules. When you look for consolidated information summarizing all the meaningful use requirements, you may quickly get frustrated. If you keep digging around, you may eventually find this PDF titled, "Eligible Professional Meaningful Use Table of Contents Core and Menu Set Measures."

This PDF includes hyperlinks that take you to specific definitions of terms. So, if you're confused about the definition of "clinical quality measures" or "clinical decision support rule," you'll find those definitions quickly and easily by using this PDF.

There are 15 core measures and 10 menu set measures for eligible professionals (EPs). Are you achieving meaningful use?

November HIMSS Virtual Conference Call for Proposals Now Open

The June 2011 HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo attracted over 4,000 registrants consisting of senior IT executives, CMIOs, COOs, CEOs, directors and managers of information systems, physicians, nurses, students, and other healthcare IT professionals. The HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo is a fully interactive event that incorporates online learning, live chat, dynamic, real-time participant movement in and out of exhibit booths and education sessions, industry solutions seminars, contests and more. Because the virtual conference is 100 percent virtual, attendees experience the conference and expo from the comfort of their own desks!

Visualizing Healthcare Transformation
The November 2011 HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo will focus on the methodologies in use today that show promise for the transformation of healthcare across the continuum of care delivery.

Track 1: 5010/ICD-10
This track will focus on aspects of the many challenges and opportunities facing the Health IT industry with the pending 5010/ICD-10 conversion.

Track 2: Meaningful Use Phase 1 and Beyond: Real World Case Studies
This track will focus on the tactics organizations and eligible providers are executing to comply with the Phase 1 Meaningful Use requirements as well as their preparation for Phase 2.

Learn more and submit your proposal here: http://www.himssvirtual.org/

Change Management Strategies to Support Meeting Meaningful Use

Last week at the HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo, there was a session titled, "Change Management Strategies to Support Meeting Meaningful Use."

Here's the Abstract:
This session will describe the importance of managing individual and organizational change required to address the impacts of achieving Meaningful Use through case studies of two organization’s change management strategies and tools.

Speakers:

Ronnie D. Bower
MA, Manager, Change Management: BayCare Health System

Julie Vilardi
RN, MS, Executive Director, KPIT CD BIO, Clinical Application Group, Kaiser Permanente

If you're registered for the HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo, you can view these on-demand sessions now: http://www.himssvirtual.org

Implementing an EHR for the Small Practice

NaviNet and Ron Sterling present: Implementing an EHR for the Small Practice
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM EDT

Implementing an EHR for the Small Practice will provide you with an overview of how your practice needs to be successful during the implementation process as well as how your practice can benefit from an electronic healthcare record (EHR).

In this session, real life EHR implementation scenarios will be examined including:

• How to build a project team?
• What to consider when setting up an EHR?
• How to change your office workflow to support an EHR?

Practice Fusion’s Electronic Health Record System Achieves Complete ONC-ATCB Meaningful Use Certification

The largest EHR community in the US is now ONC-certified. Practice Fusion’s national network of small medical practices has the potential to earn over $1 billion in incentives.

San Francisco, CA – June 7, 2011 - Practice Fusion, the fastest growing Electronic Health Record (EHR) community in the country, has been awarded ambulatory certification (ONC-ATCB 2011/2012) as a Complete EHR by Drummond Group, an Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ATCB). Practice Fusion has also launched new Meaningful Use resources to help doctors in small medical practices prepare for EHR incentives.

"The time is now," said Ryan Howard, CEO and Founder of Practice Fusion. "If you're a doctor and want to collect your stimulus cash, only Practice Fusion gives you a free EHR that you can start using today. The legacy vendors continue to promote a failure model by selling antiquated technology that costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes months to implement. Practice Fusion is the choice of nearly 100,000 healthcare professionals and we’re giving you the easiest path to incentives."

Key Facts:

• Practice Fusion completed ONC-ATCB certification on June 2, 2011 with Drummond Group
• The company’s EHR is used by over 90,000 healthcare professionals and adds over 350 new users online each day
• Practice Fusion’s community of eligible providers stands to qualify for over $1 billion in incentives for meaningful EHR use
• Legacy EHR vendors have faced significant challenges in getting users to adopt certified versions including prohibitive upgrade costs and the need to visit thousands of individual sites to install software
• Practice Fusion will provide free training and support to all users for the EHR incentive process
• Doctors interested in using Practice Fusion’s free EHR to qualify for 2011 incentives are invited to sign up today at www.practicefusion.com

11 Vendors Who Have Helped their Customers Achieve Meaningful Use

By Judy Hanover, Research Director, Provider IT Strategies, IDC Health Insights

Meaningful use has been top of mind for providers over the past 26 months, since the passage of ARRA and its HITECH Act. The initial response to ARRA was confusion and uncertainty, but as the months went by and preliminary and final requirements emerged for Stage 1, things became clearer. There is still plenty of confusion and uncertainty, but some providers have clearly been successful. This past January eligible providers in the ambulatory community were able to begin attesting to meaningful use. A few days later, we started to see press releases from successful practices and their EHR vendors, and a couple of months later, we started to ask, which vendors have successfully gotten their customers to meaningful use?

The Accelerating Countdown to Meaningful Use

Here's another complimentary HIMSS webinar:


The Accelerating Countdown to Meaningful Use
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
2:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time
Complimentary Webinar

Hospital IT executives routinely make decisions about their organization's IT infrastructure, but they cannot dictate the rate of physician adoption of critical systems, which ultimately will determine whether the organization attains Meaningful Use. Toward that end, the best any IT staff can do is deploy "physician friendly" applications that clinicians like to use and, therefore, choose to use. But the clock is ticking.

Whether your hospital has Stage 1 Meaningful Use well in hand, or it remains a distant vision, accelerating physician adoption and driving sustained Meaningful Use of healthcare IT is a challenge for all – because Stage 2 surely will raise the "adoption bar" significantly for current objectives, such as CPOE, and will add adoption goals for new objectives, like electronic documentation.

Meaningful Use Webinar: Clinical Quality Measures

Dr. Robert Rowley, Practice Fusion's CMO, will be hosting a webinar on Thursday, April 28 at 4 PM PST(7 PM EST) that will review key information about EHR Meaningful Use with an emphasis on Clinical Quality Measures (CQM).

Participants will receive in-depth information on each clinical quality measure and exceptions to each measure.

We would like to invite the user community to participate in the event and you are encouraged to invite a friend or colleague!

We would like to ask users to submit their general questions prior to the start of the webinar. Please submit all questions to community@practicefusion.com.

More information about this webinar can be found here.

Attestation for the Medicare EHR Incentive Program is now open

Registration for the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs is now open. You can register here: https://ehrincentives.cms.gov/hitech/login.action

• Medicare Eligible Professionals (EPs) are mainly physicians.
• Medicaid Eligible Professionals (EPs) include a broader audience including nurse practitioners, Physicians Assistants who practice in a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) or Rural Health Center (RHC) that is led by a Physician Assistant, and others.

The Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records (EHR) Incentive Programs will provide incentive payments to eligible professionals and eligible hospitals as they demonstrate adoption, implementation, upgrading, or meaningful use of certified EHR technology. These incentive programs are designed to support providers in this period of Health IT transition and instill the use of EHRs in meaningful ways to help our nation to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient health care.

To read about the EHR Incentive Program, click here.

Physician Using Ingenix CareTracker Becomes One of the First in the U.S. to Demonstrate Meaningful Use of Health IT

New Meaningful Use Dashboard supported patient care and administrative decision-making to help Dr. Douglas Forman demonstrate Meaningful Use in the first 90 days of 2011

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn., April 18, 2011 – Douglas Foreman, D.O., a family physician in Warwick, R.I., will be among the first physicians in the U.S. to attest to meeting Phase 1 requirements for Medicare Meaningful Use of health information technology as defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Today is the first day physicians can attest to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in order to receive Medicare incentive payments provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

To achieve this, Dr. Foreman used the Ingenix CareTracker electronic health record (EHR) system, which features a graphical Meaningful Use Dashboard created by Ingenix to help physicians monitor progress toward meeting Meaningful Use objectives and take corrective action to improve quality of care as they work to qualify for federal health IT incentives.

Get ready for the HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo June 8-9

Get ready for the HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo June 8-9, 2011

Transformational Approaches to Healthcare

The June 2011 HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo will focus on the many methods and models that are used in different care settings, including hospitals, clinical practices, Health Information Exchanges, as well as others, to transform healthcare.

Track 1: 5010/ICD-10 This track will focus on aspects of the many challenges and opportunities facing the Health IT industry with the pending 5010/ICD-10 switch. Attend to interact with speakers providing practical solutions to ensure a successful and cost-effective conversion.

Track 2: Meaningful Use Phase 1 and Beyond: Real World Case Studies This track will focus on the tactics organizations and eligible providers are executing to comply with the Phase 1 Meaningful Use requirements as well as preparation for Phase 2. Attend to learn from real-world experiences in finding the most strategic path to receiving incentive funding and planning for future challenges.

Learn more here.

Practice Fusion ONC and Meaningful Use Webinar

Dr. Robert Rowley, Practice Fusion's CMO, will be hosting a webinar on Thursday, March 24 at 4 PM PST, 7 PM EST that will review key information about the EHR Meaningful Use criteria. Participants will recieve in-depth information on:

* Meaningful Use core criteria
* Meaningful Use menu criteria
* Relevant exclusions for each criteria

More information here.

Using Clinical Decision Support to Achieve Meaningful Use #HIMSS11

If you're going to be at HIMSS, make sure to catch this presentation at the PEPID booth titled, "Using Clinical Decision Support to Achieve Meaningful Use: 6 Tips to Meet Your HIE Objectives"

Tuesday, February 22
11-11:45 a.m. | Booth 685
3:15-4:15 p.m. | Booth 263

Learn practical tips to earn meaningful use incentives with clinical decision support. Our team of meaningful use and integration experts will cover:
• what CDS data you need NOW
• planning ahead to meet the requirements of stages 2 and 3
• how the right APIs can maximize performance
• available integration options
• how mobile devices relate to meaningful use

Hope to see you at HIMSS11! Make sure to catch me for my presentations (more details here)

Surescripts is now an ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification Body

Surescripts operates the nation’s largest e-prescription network and supports a rapidly expanding ecosystem of health care organizations nationwide. They are now an ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification Body.

So, that brings the total number of authorized testing and certification bodies to 6 organizations/companies:

1. Surescripts LLC
2. ICSA Labs
3. SLI Global Solutions
4. InfoGard Laboratories, Inc.
5. Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT)
6. Drummond Group, Inc. (DGI)

Learn more here.