By Joe Carlson / HITS staff writer
Iowa has become the first state in the nation to have its Medicaid program chosen to receive funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to assess implementation of electronic health records and personal health records.
Iowa’s Medicaid program will receive a grant of $1.16 million in federal [...]
Filed under: EHR, EHR companies, Electronic Health Records on November 30th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Iowa’s Medicaid program is the first to receive matching federal funds to plan for the implementation of an EHRs incentive program as established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).
According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Iowa will receive $1.6 million in matching funds.
“While Iowa is the first state [...]
Filed under: EHR, EHR companies, Electronic Health Records, Federal Economic Stimulus Package, Health Care on November 27th, 2009 | No Comments »
By Mary Mosquera
A panel advising the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) said it will heed the overwhelming consensus it has received in recent public comments to develop the simplest possible certification standards for accelerating health IT adoption.
The Health IT Standards Committee’s implementation workgroup reported today that it distilled the testimony of [...]
Filed under: ARRA, EHR, EHR companies, HL7, Health Care on November 24th, 2009 | No Comments »
By Mary Mosquera,
Healthcare providers will have the option to use electronic health record systems to report Medicare quality and electronic prescribing measures to CMS in some of its pay-for-performance programs next year, according to an announcement by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The revisions are designed “to promote adoption and use of electronic health [...]
Filed under: ARRA, EHR, EHR companies, Health Care on November 20th, 2009 | No Comments »
By Neil Versel
Health Level Seven has published the health IT industry’s first ANSI-approved standard for using EHR information in clinical research. The standard–known as Electronic Health Record Clinical Research Functional Profile and based on the HL7 EHR System Functional Model Release 1–is a roadmap for integrating data to support both patient care and clinical research [...]
Filed under: EHR, EHR companies, Electronic Health Records on November 18th, 2009 | No Comments »
Although the federal government has yet to release final certification criteria for the “meaningful use” of electronic health records, the Certification Commission for Health IT is continuing to serve as the industry’s primary EHR certifier, ZDNet Healthcare reports.
In 2004, the trade group Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society helped found CCHIT. For several years, the [...]
Filed under: ARRA, EHR, EHR companies, Electronic Health Records on November 17th, 2009 | No Comments »
The bill, introduced by Sen. John Kerry, would make small healthcare practices eligible for federal loans.
By Mitch Wagner, InformationWeek
Senator John Kerry introduced a bill designed to help family doctors fund conversion to electronic health records.
Kerry, D-Mass., a senior member of the Finance Committee, introduced the Small Business Health Information Technology Financing Act of 2009 Tuesday. [...]
Filed under: EHR, Federal Economic Stimulus Package, Health Care on November 16th, 2009 | No Comments »
By Mary Mosquera
The National Quality Forum has published a standard set of clinical data elements to measure quality performance that electronic health records should be able to capture across all care settings.
It will make it easier to compare healthcare providers’ reports on their performance in quality measures, said Dr. Paul Tang, chairman of NQF’s Health [...]
Filed under: EHR, Electronic Health Records on November 13th, 2009 | No Comments »
Some challenges still remain, but government says it will implement integrated health information systems next year.
By Audra Mahlong, Journalist
The start-up phase for its national electronic health record system will finally begin in 2010, says the Department of Health.
While progress has been slow on the implementation of the system, the department says it will be ready [...]
Filed under: EHR, EHR companies, Health Care on November 11th, 2009 | No Comments »
By Neil Versel
The new Medicare Part B fee schedule for 2010 is encouraging doctors to adopt EHRs by, for the first time, allowing practices to use real clinical data from EHRs and e-prescribing systems to report quality measures for the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) and e-prescribing incentive programs. The change, according to CMS, [...]
Filed under: CCHIT, Electronic Health Records, Health Care on November 9th, 2009 | No Comments »