Daytona Beach, FL, Feb 18, 2011 – WorkSmart MD, Inc.  announced today it will provide Free EMR software to its physician clients that utilize its medical billing and practice management services. On February 17, 2009, President Obama signed the HITECH Act which includes provisions to promote the use of Electronic Medical Records and authorizes incentive [...]

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced today the first ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies (ATCBs). With this announcement EHR vendors can have their software certified as to meet the criteria to support meaningful use. By purchasing certified products, providers will have [...]

Is your EHR ARRA Certified? Is it CCHIT Certified? For over a year the question of EHR Certification has been a mystery. Many physicians have been on “hold” as they await to find out what it means to be a certified EHR software system. The question of Certification of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) has caused [...]

The Director of Electronic Medical Record Systems is accountable for leading the efficient installation and project management of the Network’s Electronic Medical Record. This includes coordinating all tasks, overseeing the testing and install of all systems required to provide input or output to/from the EMR, and enforcing project management, budget and change control. Collaborative, effective interaction with vendors, Department Directors, Physicians, and Executives is essential.

While the promise of electronic health records is alluring there are still many questions and obstacles that make it possible to transition from the simply paper-based SOAP documentation to an seamless integration of an electronic system. Key challenges include financing the conversion from paper to computerized records, designing the work flow, making systems easier to [...]

It’s estimated that fewer than 7% of providers in the small physician practice (1-10 physicians) have adopted and are successfully demonstrating use of electronic health record system. The reasons vary from cost to fears and myths about the “inefficiencies”, and concerns that “the government still hasn’t told us what the standards are.” Doctors and other [...]

Adapting and using electronic health records in small practices is no easy matter. A variety of public and private organizations have assisted these small practices across the country in accomplishing this, and on a national basis the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, has established a program of [...]

April 1, 2010 by TKrieger A gloStream Partner recently sent me an interesting article about EMR bullies.  These are EMR salespeople visiting doctor’s offices claiming that their solution is stimulus certified and that physician’s using their application will be able to get funding right away.  To be sure people, there are folks out there today speading such [...]

The firm that has won a $26 million public relations contract from the Department of Health and Human Services for a campaign on healthcare information technology, and related privacy and security issues, stirred up controversy with some of its previous government PR efforts. New York-based Ketchum Inc., winner of the new contract, received its share [...]

Electronic medical records (EMRs) have a bad reputation among many physicians for generating progress notes that are so verbose and filled with standard phrases that they are nearly useless to other physicians, and even to the physician who produced the note in the first place. This is in part because rather than engineering the EMR to produce a note intentionally efficient and effective for users looking at the note on a computer monitor, many EMR users choose to create a record familiar to them from years of use of paper charts. A note documenting a patient visit really serves only 3 purposes. First it is a clinical note documenting the patient’s history, findings on exam, and the assessment and plan of care. This is ideally efficient to generate, easy to review, and have the information needed in future visits in an easy to see and understand format. Secondly the note is a legal document, providing documentation of care and advice provided, and needs to be useful in case of a legal challenge. Third it needs to document the care done to justify billing and assure payment by third party payers. A good note does all of these things. In many EMR systems the last two are done well, but the clinical usefulness of the note is very poor.

Some young physicians say they won’t go to a practice without one. Then you put on top of that the stimulus, which effectively, in year one, gives somebody $18,000 for an electronic health record that probably costs just over half of that and you’ve got the seeds for very rapid growth. That is consistent in saying that we are seeing new demand, as well as continued demand from our existing clients to upgrade, to buy more training, to get ready for Meaningful Use.

Content written and reprinted from searchhealthit.com Two organizations currently have a hand in health IT certification. The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, or CCHIT, looks at the software itself, while The Joint Commission examines health IT in the larger context of providing quality health care. However, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical [...]

The Apple iPhone rocked the world. It created a niche market for medical software development and more importantly it was cool to have it. Every doctor wanted one and right now it is estimated that 1 out of 20 physicians carries an iPhone.

Having helped over a hundred physician practice to implement EHR I have seen the benefits of tablet computing for documenting patient encounters in the EMR. I believe that iPad computing will become a big part of the EMR/EHR toolkit in the years to come.

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology has established Health Information Technology (HIT) Regional Extension Centers to support adoption of HIT. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, ONC awarded grants for the establishment and operation of Regional Extension Centers to provide HIT technical assistance to health care [...]

Building on the historic $19 billion investment provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act), efforts continued today to further the national adoption and implementation of health information technology (HIT) — an essential tool to modernize the health care system and bring about improved health for all Americans. The Health Information [...]