How we can move to value-based health care delivery

Health Policy
December 22, 2015

A recent study of health care organizations showed that most are not prepared to deliver standardized longitudinal care across multiple provider systems. Shared care plans will be the centerpiece of coordinated care delivery, incentivized by the move from fee-for-service to value-based care. In 2015, Medicare unveiled its plan to transition to quality-based payments via the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), which will sunset and subsume earlier quality-encouraging programs, and …

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How we can move to value-based health care delivery

I despise my EHR. But I’m still using it.

Health Technology
September 20, 2015

emr

Modern electronic health records (EHRs) have become the norm in U.S. health care — nearly 80 percent of office-based physicians use them, up from 40 percent in 2009, according to federal data. But while adoption is up, satisfaction has plummeted. In 2010, about 61 percent of physicians liked their EHRs (were satisfied or very satisfied, according to periodic AMA surveys). This dropped …

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I despise my EHR. But I’m still using it.

Is the patient experience enhanced by modern technology?

Health Technology
March 19, 2012

Most physicians went into the practice of medicine motivated (at least in part) by the reward that comes from that human-to-human connection. The reward that comes from helping people. It was true of my generation of physicians, it was true of those before me, and is true of newer generations of physicians who grew up in a more interconnected, digitized world.

We are now at a time in medicine where an …

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Is the patient experience enhanced by modern technology?

Who should control cradle to grave patient health records?

Health Technology
March 6, 2012

Health IT is evolving quickly, and the concept of a cradle-to-grave patient health record, aggregated from all the different places where pieces of one’s health story are found, is no longer such science-fiction.

The emergence of interoperable networks is beginning to mature, and is a central focus for health IT in 2012. Whether that involves traditional Health Information Exchange (HIE) hubs (an institution-centered play), or a more direct point-to-point method, or …

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Who should control cradle to grave patient health records?

How an EHR will impact physician productivity

Health Technology
September 10, 2011

One of the big concerns about implementing an electronic health record (EHR) into a medical practice is the fear that it will slow you down. In fact, after cost, usability (and its effect on productivity) is the second-biggest perceived barrier to EHR adoption.

Numerous studies have shown that EHR implementation actually ends up saving cost in a group practice, mainly because of reducing or eliminating the need for paper-based medical …

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How an EHR will impact physician productivity

The difference between an ambulatory and hospital EHR

Health Technology
June 19, 2011

What difference is there between an inpatient EHR and an ambulatory EHR?

The difference is quite significant, actually. Let’s start by looking a little deeper into hospital IT issues, and the evolution of tools that try to address them.

The hospital EHR environment

 

Traditionally, from an IT perspective, a hospital is not really a single system – it is a collection of systems in various departments.

Over the past few decades, each …

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The difference between an ambulatory and hospital EHR

Can ACOs curb health costs and improve quality of care?

Health Policy
April 2, 2011

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have received considerable attention recently, and are the new “hot topic” in healthcare delivery policy circles. They are the latest response to the need to do something to stem the runaway inflation of healthcare costs, while maintaining or improving measurable health care quality.

According to a …

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Can ACOs curb health costs and improve quality of care?

EHR implementation in the ambulatory or hospital setting

Health Technology
January 27, 2011

Adoption of electronic health records (EHR) systems remains a challenge, both for hospitals as well as for physicians in ambulatory practice. The process of adoption, implementation, and meaningful use of EHRs (let us keep in mind) is actually quite different between those two setting.

Much has been written concerning EHR adoption within hospitals. Much of the experience in computerized physician order entry (CPOE) comes from hospital EHR adoption, and many of …

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EHR implementation in the ambulatory or hospital setting

Electronic health records (EHR) to improve medication compliance

Health Technology
November 29, 2010

A recent report in the Annals of Internal Medicine on the characteristics of prescriptions that are abandoned at the pharmacy raise the question of (1) how to ensure that people actually pick up their prescriptions, and (2) how to make sure that people actually take the medications that are prescribed.

What role does modern Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology play in this question?

A study by the non-profit New England Healthcare Institute …

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Electronic health records (EHR) to improve medication compliance