Healthcare IT Best Practices: 2012

Health IT predictions for 2013

Information Week has reached out to CIOs, health IT professionals, analysts, bloggers and other HIT heavyweights in a series of email interviews to get their health information technology predictions for 2013

ICD-10 Education & Training Best Practices

EHRintelligence has outlined the training strategy for the staff who will be directly involved in using the new ICD-10 codes.

HIE Buyers' Guide

The University of California-Davis released a buyers' guide highlighting interoperability and interface features needed to support HIEs. The "HIE Ready" buyers' guide was developed by the California Health eQuality program at the university's Institute for Population Health Improvement.

HIE best practices: Preparing for health information exchange

Tom Skorup and Erin Sparnon, from the Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI), a nonprofit organization, offer insight based on their experiences working with healthcare systems to improve the exchange of health information.

How to Implement EHRs

National Learning Consortium (NLC) has developed an EHR Implementation Lifecycle for Health care Providers & Professionals.

Rules for an effective Health Information Exchange (HIE)

Joel Ryba, COO of HIXNY, lays out 16 rules for an effective HIE.

10 ways to make an EMR truly meaningful for doctors

Dr. Rob Lamberts, an internal medicine-pediatrics physician, has blogged about would make EMR something that is really meaningful.

Questions to ask before selecting an HIE vendor

At Blueprint Healthcare IT webinar last week on the “Top Ten Ways an HIE Can Go Wrong”, John Moore founder and managing partner of Chilmark Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based analyst firm focusing solely on the healthcare IT market, gave some good advice on what pertinent questions to ask when selecting the right vendor partner.

He says when choosing an HIE technology partner, providers should assess how complete the solution is before purchasing. For instance, he says, if the provider organization already has a master person index (MPI) then it may not be necessary to seek out a vendor that has that as a part of its package. He urges to do more than rudimentary reference check, but to dig deep to really asses the vendor’s capabilities.

The Chilmark Research report, “2012 HIE Market Report: Analysis and Trends,”discusses how vendors are now modularizing their offerings and migrating toward PaaS, platform as a service solutions. Moore notes that early on many HIE vendors had vague solutions that took a long time to value, which cast a pall on the market. In response to that, vendors have been modularizing their solutions to create a step-wise path to success. "It's breaking up that all-encompassing solution into bite-size pieces that can be easily deployed and deliver rapid time to value," says Moore. Once the data pipeline is in place within an HIE, PaaS services can be layered on through APIs to present data in interesting ways forclinical decision support, referral management, and RCM capabilities.

With the instability of the HIE market (Moore estimates there have been more than 10 acquisitions in the past two years), organizations should try to answer these questions before making a selection:

Who best maps to our core strategy?
Where will solution be deployed?
How will value and time to value be measured?
How much control does vendor have over the product roadmap?
How much disruption will there be down the line if vendor is acquired?
How timely are vendor updates?
How quickly does vendor fix bugs?
How will vendor execute the organization’s vision?

Suggestions to help you successfully implement an EMR solution

Twelve valuable gotchas developed by HIMSS that should be considered before and during any EMR implementation

Tips for EHR vendors to insure that their clients get paid for Meaningful Use

White Paper by AthenaHealth describing seven tips and valuable lessons about what it takes for any EHR vendor to deliver measurable results on Meaningful Use for its clients.

Tips on Testing for ICD-10 impact on Provider Business Processes

Brien Keller's list ICD-10 impact on Healthcare Providers

Tips on Testing for ICD-10 Impact on Payer Business Porcesses

Steve Sisko's list of ICD-10 impact on Healthcare Payers

Practical tips for an easy ICD-10 transition

Helpful tips from Dan Rodrigues, CEO of Kareo.com, a web-based medical billing software company about ICD-10 rollouts.

PACS interconnectivity and interoperability issues and solutions

A very insightful article from Shahid Shah about the Top 5 Interconnectivity and interoperability issues. His article also offers solutions to this challenges.

Medical Billing Software

Questions to Consider when trying to choose the right Medical Billing Software for your practice.

Data Extraction or Migration for EHR Systems

Whether you are starting a new EHR implementation or simply trying to extract that data one should not underestimate the complexities associated with extracting data elements such as Patient Demographics, Insurance, Appointments, Past Medical History, Family History, Social History, Surgical History, Medications, Allergies, Vitals, Immunizations, Images, Scanned Documents, Lab Results and Encounter Notes.

Once the data is extracted, You might be faced with a second challenge and that is: Conversion. Data Conversion processes begins by translating each record into a format readable by the new EHR.

Each EHR stores data in its own individual format (database files, text documents, photos, etc.)

Mr. Mark Anderson, CEO of AC Group and a Healthcare IT Futurist, has put together a very useful paper that outlines the essential ingredients to a successful and pain free conversion or extraction of data.

Healthcare IT Best Practices