DOD – The Health Care Blog

HIT Newser: The Not-So-Big Meaningful Use Stick

Feb 17, 2015

By MICHELLE RONAN NOTEBOOM

This Year’s Meaningful Use “Sticks”: Not that Big

CMS reports that the majority of physicians who will be penalized this year for not having met MU requirements will lose less than $1,000 of their Medicare reimbursement; 34% of the penalties will be $250 or less, while 31% will exceed $2,000.

The adjustments will impact approximately 257,000 eligible providers. While no one likes losing money, the CMS penalty “stick” is pretty small compared to the overall cost of implementing an EHR.

Mayo Provides Dr. Google with 2^nd Opinion

Google consults with the Mayo Clinic to expand its healthcare information for 400 medical conditions.

Given that 20% of all Google searches are related to health conditions, the change will no doubt shake up what Americans find when searching for medical information. The update includes the addition of illustrations for each condition, plus a full list of search results from sites such as WebMD and Wikipedia.

CDC Laboratory Guidance on Ebola

Aug 20, 2014• 15

By Tom Frieden, MD

For more than four decades, Ebola virus had only been diagnosed in central or eastern Africa.

Then late this past March, the first cases of Ebola began appearing in a surprising part of the continent. The Ministry of Health in Guinea notified WHO of a rapidly evolving outbreak of Ebola virus disease. The outbreak in Guinea was the first sign the virus had made the jump across the continent.

Ebola then spread quickly to Sierra Leone and Liberia, and then to Nigeria.

As the world learned of the cases, CDC began receiving questions from American hospital labs. They were looking for guidance on how to handle testing for patients who had recently returned to the U.S. from West Africa with potential Ebola symptoms.

If U.S. hospitals were to run laboratory tests on these patients, how could they be sure their staff could safely handle materials that might contain this dangerous virus? Did they need the kind of personal protective equipment they saw CDC scientists using when they were testing for Ebola?