Dolbey Executes Interface License Agreement with 3M Health Information Systems Comments Off
Dolbey Systems, Inc. has completed an Interface License Agreement with 3M Health Information Systems of Murray, Utah. The Agreement licenses the interfacing of Dolbey’s Fusion CAC™ computer-assisted coding solution to the 3M™ Coding and Reimbursement System (CRS).
For more about Dolbey’s Fusion CAC solution visit www.dolbey.com.
About Dolbey
Dolbey is a leader in providing dictation, transcription, speech recognition and coding solutions for healthcare in the United States and Canada. Together, Dolbey and Company, Inc. and Dolbey Systems, Inc. offer the award winning Fusion Suite™ of integrated products which is backed by one of the industry’s largest organization of certified professionals who assist in design, implementation and support.
About 3M Health Information Systems
Best known for market-leading coding solutions and ICD-10 expertise, 3M Health Information Systems delivers innovative software and consulting services that raise the bar for clinical documentation improvement, computer-assisted coding, case mix and quality outcomes reporting, and a robust healthcare data dictionary and terminology services to support your EHR. With 28 years of coding experience and more than 100 credentialed coding experts, 3M is the go-to choice for 5,000+ hospitals worldwide that want to improve quality and financial performance.
For further information, please contact:
Traci Miller, Marketing Executive
800-878-7828 x 119 / tmiller@dolbey.com
www.dolbey.com
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8 Breach Prevention Tips Comments Off
Action Items Based on Lessons Learned
By Howard Anderson for GovInfo Security
What can be learned from the more than 390 major breaches affecting more than 19 million individuals that have been reported as a result of the federal HIPAA breach notification rule? Plenty, breach prevention experts say.
Here are eight key breach-prevention insights from information security thought-leaders:
1. Don’t Forget Risk Assessments
The details of the biggest breaches last year “make it painfully clear that inadequate, if any, HIPAA security risk analysis took place prior to the breaches,” says Dan Berger, CEO at Redspin. “A comprehensive security risk assessment would have identified where PHI [protected health information] is stored, who has access to it and how it’s utilized in the normal workflow. The analysis would then investigate whether sufficient controls are in place.”
Because so many huge breaches have involved the loss or theft of mobile devices and media containing unencrypted PHI, Berger concludes that risk assessments were either not conducted or they failed to pinpoint that vulnerability. He urges organizations to conduct comprehensive assessments that take into account external and internal infrastructure, web applications and wireless security and lead to a mobile device policy and in-depth employee training.
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Physicians: iPad Not Ready For Clinical Use Comments Off
By Ken Terry for InformationWeek
Most doctors still use desktops because iPads lack speech processing capabilities. One expert, however, says iPad EHRs are coming.
Eighty percent of physicians in a recent survey said they believe that the Apple iPad has an “exciting future in healthcare”–but they doubt it is ready for clinical use.
The survey of 100 “early adopter” physicians by Spyglass Consulting Group in Menlo Park, Calif., also found that 83% of the respondents used desktop computers to access clinical information, whether they were in the hospital, in the office, or at home. Some physicians said they used mobile devices to retrieve healthcare data when they were traveling.
Pretty much the same could have been said of physicians five years ago, when many of them used reference tools and calculators on personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smartphones, but few doctors looked up clinical information on those devices. Some physicians used tablet computers with their EHRs, and some used tablets or PDAs for e-prescribing, charge capture, or both.
One barrier to clinical use of iPads today is the attitude of hospitals. “Seventy-five percent of physicians interviewed reported that hospital IT [staff] was resistant to supporting personal mobile devices on the corporate network,” the Spyglass release said. “Hospital IT believes personal devices are insecure, less reliable, and more expensive to deploy, support and maintain than desktop computers.”
That finding jibes with other recent studies. But as the Spyglass report acknowledges, hospital security concerns are not the major obstacle to iPad use in clinical work.
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Proceed With Caution Comments Off
By David Yeager for For The Record
Speech recognition can help reduce costs, but healthcare organizations should take steps to ensure they’re not sacrificing quality in the process.
Everyone loves to save money but in today’s healthcare environment, cutting costs is more a matter of necessity than desire.
Rather than allow the quality of care to suffer, hospitals typically look for ways to work more efficiently and with fewer employees. For this reason, one process that has been of interest during the past five to 10 years is physician dictation. Because dictation typically requires four minutes of transcription for every minute of dictation, it’s often viewed as an area of potential cost savings—provided the process can be automated to a degree that allows for a significant reduction in worker hours.
As a result, an increasing number of hospitals have adopted or are considering adopting speech recognition technology. The specific reasons for doing it may vary among institutions, but it’s a safe bet that cost savings will be atop nearly everyone’s list. Unfortunately, hospitals that expect speech recognition to produce a windfall may be disappointed.
“I think there’s no question that the expectation that speech recognition can help dramatically reduce the cost of document production is out there in the marketplace,” says Dale Kivi, MBA, director of business development for FutureNet Technologies Corporation. “The reality of it is, because it is not foolproof and there is an editing phase that’s needed to go along with the technology, the actual savings are considerably less than what people think it might be.”
That’s not to say there aren’t good reasons for installing the technology; it just means that hospitals need to look at the big picture when they’re figuring out their bottom line. Although there may be savings on up-front transcription costs, factors such as document quality and the way speech recognition is used within the facility play a significant role in the ultimate cost.
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HealthGrades Names Top Cities for Hospital Care Comments Off
Study By HealthGrades
HealthGrades Quality Study Identifies Hospitals in Top 5% in Nation; Cities That Have Highest Concentration of Top Hospitals
Patients Treated at HealthGrades Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence Have 30% Lower Chance of Dying
How does the quality of care at hospitals in your area compare? Find out with HealthGrades second annual list of America’s Top Cities for Hospital Care. HealthGrades is the leading provider of information to help consumers make an informed decision about a physician or hospital. The independent rankings are based on a comprehensive study of patient death and complication rates at the nation’s nearly 5,000 hospitals.
As part of its tenth annual HealthGrades Hospital Quality and Clinical Excellence study, HealthGrades identified those hospitals performing in the top 5% nationwide across 26 different medical procedures and diagnoses, then ranked cities by highest percentage of these Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence™.
Selecting a Top Hospital Matters
In an environment where one in seven Medicare beneficiaries is harmed as a result of their hospitalization (Source: Department of Health and Human Services) and patients are fearful of the very institutions that are entrusted with saving their lives, it is important to identify and acknowledge those hospitals that are leading the way in reducing mortality and complication rates and to provide consumers access to this information.
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The Coding Enabler Comments Off
By Julie Knudson for For The Record
If used correctly, computer-assisted coding can help hospitals alleviate inefficiencies.
As computer-assisted coding (CAC) is deployed by an increasing number of hospitals, its effect on coders is coming into focus. The evolution of workflow changes, productivity increases ahead of ICD-10, and fear of diminishing job prospects are all buzz-worthy topics.
Workflow Changes
The existing workflow within many hospitals could be slowing down coders. Chris Casto, vice president of Dolbey Systems, says coders are currently using what he calls “buckets” of information. “They’re working out of the HIS [hospital information systems], a lot of times they have to log in to nurses’ notes, and they log into billing systems to look at chargemaster codes, so the workflow is really disjointed in a lot of ways.”
Casto believes CAC adoption helps pull those buckets together, giving the coder one place to go for information. “In that fact alone, they really do see, I think, a streamlined workflow because they’re not in multiple applications,” he says. “They’re not logged in all over the place. Everything they need to see is in one place, and it has to be that way for CAC to function effectively.”
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Most Medicare demonstration projects haven’t saved money Comments Off
By Chris Anderson, Senior Editor, Healthcare Finance News
Most of the Medicare fee-for-service demonstration projects launched in the past two decades using disease management and value-based payments have failed to reduce costs, says a report issued yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office.
“In nearly every program involving disease management and care coordination, spending was either unchanged or increased relative to the spending that would have occurred in the absence of the program, when the fees paid to the participating organizations were considered,” the report stated.
Further, while it noted that projects where care managers had substantial direct interactions with both physicians were more likely to reduce costs, the size of those reductions weren’t enough to offset the care managers’ fees.
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Health-Care Sector Adds Jobs as Overall Employment Picture Looks Healthier Comments Off
By Katherine Hobson originally published on WSJ Health Blog
The jobs picture last month improved overall — and the health-care sector, which has been a bright spot throughout the downturn, continued to grow.
As the WSJ reports, nonfarm payrolls rose by 200,000 people in December as the unemployment rate, calculated using a separate survey, fell to 8.5% from 8.7% in November.
Here’s the full report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Job growth at private employers outstripped job losses in government. The health-care industry added 22,600 jobs in December, following a revised increase of 16,000 jobs the previous month. (Originally the government reported a slightly larger November gain of 17,200, as we reported.)
Data from the BLS show the type of facilities that are hiring, but not the specific types of jobs being added. For example, the report shows that hospitals added 9,800 jobs, but doesn’t reveal whether those are physicians, IT support staff or janitors.
Ambulatory health-care services added a net 11,300 jobs as doctors’ offices, outpatient care centers and home-health services all added positions.
Nursing-care facilities shed about 500 jobs. But the broader category of nursing and residential-care facilities overall gained a net 1,500 jobs in December.
OIG Most Wanted Fugitives Comments Off
Gerald T. Roy, Deputy Inspector General for Investigations at the Office of Inspector General lists the agency’s most wanted fugitives responsible for the theft of over $400 million.
Click here to read more information about OIG’s most wanted health care fugitives. In all, they are seeking more than 170 fugitives on charges related to health care fraud and abuse.
Top 11 Trends for 2012 in Healthcare Data, According to Industry Experts Comments Off
A Look Ahead Points to Increased Risks; Regulatory Expectations; Reputational Fallout
PORTLAND, Ore., Jan. 5, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Hospitals and healthcare organizations will need more than a couple of aspirin to ready themselves for 2012. Industry experts representing healthcare law, privacy, security, regulatory and data breach were asked to forecast healthcare data trends for 2012. The overall forecast? Protecting patients’ protected health information (PHI) should be viewed as a patient safety issue. If the right actions are not taken, experts predict healthcare data breach will reach epidemic proportions this year.
2011 was the year when most physicians had mobile devices; when healthcare became one of the most-breached industries; and the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) cracked the whip with investigations and multi-million-dollar fines for organizations that didn’t meet their patient privacy obligations.
Top 2012 predictions in healthcare data:
