By Patrick Conway – The launch of the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement Model (CJR) on April 1 is a major step toward transforming care delivery in Medicare. Why? Because this model looks to improve care and quality for the most common procedures that Medicare beneficiaries have, hip and knee replacements.
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By Johanna Legaspi – Hierarchical Condition Categories were mandated in 1997 by CMS and have been the basis for reimbursement for Medicare Advantage plans since 2004. HCCs use data to prospectively estimate predicted costs for enrolled members during the next year of coverage.
By Matt Patterson MD – There is broad agreement that the U.S. healthcare system must focus on improving overall care quality and cost efficiency. The pressures imposed on the system by the Affordable Care Act make this need abundantly clear.
By Seth Pazinski & Talisha Searcy – We are asking for your input on ways to measure the progress toward a future where health information is flowing between providers and patients to support a health system that provides better care, smarter spending, and healthier people.
By Brian Mack – There is arguably no topic in health information technology that generates more industry media coverage and online chatter than Interoperability. There is no doubt that a nationally connected system for securely and seamlessly sharing electronic health data is an inevitable necessity.
By John Halamka MD – On March 29th I read a New York Times article about a possible successor to Bitcoin called Ethereum, which provides a distributed database (no central repository) for the purpose of tracking financial transactions. I immediately thought of the challenge we have turning silos of medical information into a linked, complete, accurate, secure, lifetime medical record.
By Matt Fisher – sits down with Mac McMillan, the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of CynergisTek, Inc., to discuss cybersecurity issues facing the healthcare industry. The discussion focused on ransomware, the role of data in healthcare, which includes where generated and how utilized, and how to manage access to data.
By Sara Rosenbaum – Kentucky Governor Matthew Bevin has proposed to end Kynect, his state’s highly popular health insurance marketplace, and replace it with the federal marketplace, HealthCare.gov. HHS recently signaled that the federal government would decide whether the governor may proceed, and under what conditions, by June 1.
By Shefali Luthra – In a perfect world, patients with advance directives would be confident that their doctors and nurses, no matter where they receive care, could know in a split second their end-of-life wishes. But this ideal is still in the distance. Patients’ documents often go missing in maze-like files or are rendered unreadable by incompatible software.