Website launched to provide detailed information about EHR incentive programs June 28, 2010

Helping Provide the Electronic Rx for Health Records Management School Wins Grant to Find Best Ways to Digitize Patient Data Jun. 17, 2010 Last year’s economic stimulus package paved the way for the creation of an electronic medical records (EMR) database. Now, the UT Dallas School of Management is going to play a significant role [...]

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.

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 [...]

OHIP is a nonprofit that was established last year by the state. It has about $43 million in federal and state funding to help accomplish two key health information technology goals. First, the organization will help set up a health information exchange (HIE), which is essentially a state-wide computer network that will allow hospitals and doctors’ offices to easily share patients’ health information. Second, OHIP will help doctors acquire, implement and learn how to use the electronic health records (EHR) systems that will be the backbone of the exchange.

Leading the effort–for now–is Amy Andres, OHIP’s chairman and the Ohio Department of Insurance’s chief of staff. Andres was likely chosen for the role because of her background in government, health and information technology. She led the pharmacy benefits management business for Chicago-based electronic prescribing company AllScripts, and held positions with CVS ProCare and IT consulting firm Sarcom. She also worked as the CIO for the Ohio Department of Education.

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.

The HITECH Act amends Section 3012 (a) of the Public Health Service Act and establishes the Health Information Technology Extension Program (Extension Program).
The Regional Extension Centers (RECs) will offer technical assistance, guidance, and information to support and accelerate health care providers’ efforts to become meaningful users of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). This list represents the final 60 awarded centers.

L.A. Care Health Plan, the nation’s largest public health plan, announced today that the organization has received a $15.6 million federal grant to establish the Health Information Technology Regional Extension Center (REC), called HITEC-LA, that will help doctors in L.A. County adopt and use Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in a meaningful way. HITEC-LA will be the sole REC in L.A. County, under the terms of the grant. The grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) will receive more than $23 million of the $2 billion allocated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to achieve widespread meaningful use of health IT and facilitate use of an electronic health record (EHR) by every person by the year 2014. The newborn New Jersey Health Information Technology Extension Center (NJ-HITEC) initiative proposed by NJIT Senior Vice President for Research and Development Donald H. Sebastian, PhD, principal investigator, will assist New Jersey’s health care providers in their significant use of health information technology through outreach, consultation and user support for the state’s primary care providers serving at-risk population centers.

The University of Central Florida’s College of Medicine has been awarded more than $7 million to build a regional electronic medical records system that promises to make health care more efficient and less costly.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced April 6ththat UCF will receive nearly $7.7 million, as one of 28 nonprofits awarded a total of $267 million to establish Health Information Technology Regional Extension Centers. The University of South Florida was awarded $5.8 million and The Community Health Centers Alliance in St. Petersburg will receive $10.9 million.

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.