By John Halamka MD – Communicating the IT strategic plan is one of the primary responsibilities of a CIO. Most importantly, the IT strategic plan should be seen as an enterprise wide activity and not just an IT centric exercise. IT should be an enabler for the strategy of the business and every IT tactic should tie back to a high priority of the business.
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By Adam Culbertson – The promise of EHRs is that they will improve quality and lower cost. The basis of this claim is in part due to a presumption of EHR interoperability. Patient matching has been identified as a critical barrier to interoperability. Patient matching refers to the act of accurately linking individuals to their health data located in various disparate electronic health databases.
By Jenny Gold – This season, Downton Abbey has a new plot line that has health wonks on the edge of their seats: a heated debate about hospital consolidation that closely parallels what’s going on in the U.S. health care system today.
By Renzi Russell – What if I told you that your practice is missing out on revenue because of an outdated fee schedule? Would you know how to fix it? Unfortunately, many practices are losing revenue because of their fee schedule and they don’t know that updating it would improve their bottom line.
By Keith Boone – One recent concern about FHIR that has crossed several different list servers recently is that of making patient health data more readily hackable. In one scenario, the concern goes: If we make patient data more accessible via FHIR, that will also make it more likely to be hacked. Another scenario goes:
By William Hersh MD – Many who write and talk about health IT, including myself, are fond of using analogies. One of the most common analogies that we use is that of the banking industry. I have noted that I can insert my Wells Fargo ATM card into just about any ATM in the world and receive out local currency.
By Robert Rowley MD – We are at the threshold of a new way of paying for healthcare. We have paid for it traditionally with fee-for-service, a legacy that goes back to the beginning of third-party payments for healthcare (insurance) in the early and mid-1900s.
By Jeff Jones – The healthcare industry has unveiled another addition to the already enormous alphabet soup. This new addition goes by the name MIPS, or more properly, Merit-based Incentive Payment System. Healthcare providers are scrambling to better understand how MACRA, Meaningful Use, and MIPS will impact their practices.
By John Halamka MD & Micky Tripathi – It’s been over 10 years since ONC head David Brailer and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson published the “The Decade of Health Information Technology”, one of the goals of which was to create a “a new network to link health records nationwide.”