Electronic Health Record

Washington Debrief: Flex-IT Bill Makes Series of Meaningful Use Program Changes

By Leslie Kriegstein, Interim Vice President of Public Policy, CHIME for Healthcare Informatics Congressional Affairs Flex-IT Bill Makes Series of Meaningful Use Program Changes Key Takeaway: Congresswoman Renee Ellmers (R-NC-02) introduced legislation last week that makes a series of substantial improvements to the Meaningful Use Program, including a delay in the release Stage 3 rules.…

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Pentagon gets ready to award big contract for electronic medical records

By Amy Ellis Nutt and Amy Brittain for The Washington Post The Pentagon is poised within days to award one of the most coveted health information-technology contracts in history — the first phase of a deal that could ultimately be worth more than $10.5 billon over the 18-year life of the contract. This is the…

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Congress Considers Putting Brakes on Stage 3

By Joseph Goedert for HealthData Management Federal lawmakers are noticing some dark clouds surrounding the electronic health records meaningful use program to prod providers to adopt EHRs. With rising recent struggles in the program, lawmakers may be poised to intervene to push back the program’s third stage. Problems with the current stage are all too…

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Providence worker to serve 2 years for giving medical records to drug dealer

By Tulsi Patil for KTUU.com ANCHORAGE – An Anchorage woman was sentenced to two years in federal prison Monday for violations to medical privacy laws, U.S. Attorney Karen Loeffler’s office announced in a press release. According to prosecutors, 33-year-old Stacy Laulu was a financial counselor at Providence Hospital in March, 2013 when she was contacted…

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CDC: Electronic quality data a boon to public health reporting

By Government Health IT Staff for Government Health IT The use of electronic clinical quality measures (eCQM) for reporting data will be “invaluable” for monitoring numerous clinical conditions, according to research published in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidly and Mortality Weekly Report. The report used eCQM data that was submitted by 63,000…

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The Medical Bill Mystery

By Elisabeth Rosenthal for The New York Times I CONFESS I filed this column several weeks late in large part because I had hoped first to figure out a medical bill whose serial iterations have been arriving monthly like clockwork for half a year. As medical bills go, it’s not very big: $225, from a…

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Technologies to Support Clinical Documentation Improvement

By Dr. Jonathan Elion, MD, FACC for HealthTECH Zone The Photographic Painting The value of a new technology is often not understood for many years after its invention. The first film cameras (remember those?) were initially used to capture landscapes, still life studies and portraits. In that regard, they were acting as a “photographic painting”,…

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EHRs Increasingly Included in Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Source: iHealthBeat Electronic health records are increasingly being cited in medical malpractice lawsuits, Politico reports. According to a review of data by the Doctors Company, a physician-owned medical malpractice insurer, EHRs were involved in just 1% of a sample of lawsuits that had been closed between 2007 and 2013. However, the frequency of such EHR-related…

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