‘Connected Communities’ Grants Aim to Address Critical Healthcare Issues Via Increased Use of Innovative Technologies. MeHI, the Massachusetts eHealth Institute at MassTech, awarded $3,038,000 in grants to drive community-level collaboration among healthcare providers using innovative technologies.
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By Sarianne Gruber – “There are a lot of tech savvy people making apps for tech-savvy people. It’s a wonderful world that we live in with the ability to do that but we are not going to bend the cost curve in the United States by providing an app for an otherwise healthy forty-year-old person with diabetes or for the sixty-year-old that has a heart condition who is out on the golf course.
The National Association for Trusted Exchange welcomed its newest member, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. By joining NATE and participating in the NATE Blue Button for Consumers Trust Bundle, VA is demonstrating its commitment to enabling its Veterans to send their health data to the consumer-facing application of their choice.
By Deanne Kasim – With the increase in specialty drugs, innovative diagnostic testing, and precision medicine, it is expected that the use of the Prior Authorization will only increase with health insurance companies. Of course I have heard from many re: the (theoretical) fact that as the use of value-based provider reimbursement matures, there will be less and less need for a PA process.
By Roger Davis – “We are deadly serious about interoperability.” – Andy Slavitt, Acting Administrator of the CMS at the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco in January 2016. For those of us in the healthcare vendor community, that defining statement sets the tone for the future interaction between organizations.
By Patrick Conway MD – Last year, a bipartisan Congressional majority passed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, or MACRA. We have worked in the same spirit as the law’s model of partnership and progress as we implement policies to improve the health and well-being of Americans.
By Susan Jaffe – Despite interventions by Medicare officials, the number of appeals from health care providers and patients challenging denied claims continues to spiral, increasing the backlog of cases and delaying many decisions well beyond the timeframes set by law, according to a government study released on June 9th.
By Matt Patterson MD – In May, The Joint Commission announced that it was changing its five-year-old ban on texting, stating that effective immediately health care organizations may now allow orders to be transmitted via text message. The topic of ‘secure messaging’ has long been a polarizing topic within the health care industry.
By Ashish Jha – Get a group of health policy experts together and you’ll find one area of near universal agreement: we need more transparency in healthcare. The notion behind transparency is straightforward; greater availability of data on provider performance helps consumers make better choices and motivates providers to improve.