Today’s healthcare information technology headlines are littered with how large delivery networks are scaling up and successfully building and using IT infrastructure. But the real success story is hiding in the shadows of these large enterprise deployments, in the small and independent practices across the US. The recent ICD-10 transition, that had been foretold to drive small enterprise into financial despair due to their lack of IT savvy and infrastructure, has shown just the opposite. A report from a leading provider of billing software that was based on government and private payer claims analysis for the past 30 days shows a different story.Continue reading…
ONC’s Interoperability Plan: a Day Late and $19bn Short
Earlier this month, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology released an update to Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap. The roadmap was first announced back in January, and the changes shared this month aren’t significant.
Ultimately, it calls for all healthcare providers nationwide to be able to send and receive electronic clinical information by the end of 2017.
This is a good plan on the surface, although it comes six years and millions of dollars late, and like other programs it may be more cumbersome that it first seems. Essentially, there are three facets:
1) Data standards to format and request/receive data
2) Incentives (again!)
3) Governance
Despite the intention to move data across the Union, each state will have the right to create its own unique rules on how to manage the exchange of information. This is a problem as we have seen before in the simple Case of e-prescription routing. A few states make it almost impossible to send e-scripts and layer on their own special form of bureaucracy. This inhibits the ultimate goal of reducing costs and errors and increasing Efficiency at the expense of both providers and patients.
