5 Steps to Success with Stage 2 Meaningful Use

In a white paper published by AthenaHealth Inc. on September 2013, it lists the following five steps to successfully bring a medical practice through the Meaningful Use program and beyond:

Step 1: Assess Your Starting Point 
See how Stage 1 compares to Stage 2, and where you need to focus to attain Meaningful Use objectives.

Step 2: Plot Your Timeline
Understand your incentive payment schedule, your Meaningful Use reporting period, and how to ramp up to Stage 2 while also undergoing the 2014 ICD-10 conversion.

Step 3: Upgrade Your EHR 
Assess your EHR’s ability to handle the Stage 2 requirements, including the required transition to the 2014 certified version, and determine the right criteria for evaluating EHRs if you need to switch.

Step 4: Integrate Meaningful Use Measures into Your Workflow 
Evaluate your current workflow to maximize performance and increase your Stage 1 performance to meet the Stage 2 thresholds.

Step 5: Create A Patient Engagement Strategy
Create a patient engagement strategy that leverages technology and marketing to launch and promote a patient portal and actively engage patients in their care.

10 Steps for Surviving ARRA & ACA Requirements

Dr. Dick Taylor, a managing director and chief medical officer of MedSys Group’s Advisory Services Division, in his June 3rd 2014 article in Imaging Technology News articulated 10 goals for this year as it is the final sprint toward ARRA and ACA’s deadlines. Surviving this environment will require providers to focus on achieving the following goals over the course of 2014:

1. Reduce expenses, both per-patient and fixed overhead. Admittedly, this is easier said than done.

2. Where practical, grow larger through acquisition or affiliation. This spreads fixed overhead over a larger patient volume and allows much more efficient team-based and whole-patient care. Growth must, however, be calculated and managed to capture these savings. Rapidly growing organizations must be watchful to avoid operational and cultural traps.

3. Achieve Meaningful Use and avoid ARRA Medicare penalties. Providers who have missed Meaningful Use to date are now looking at reduced awards and penalties (amounting to small but significant percentages of CMS billing) beginning in 2015.

4. Achieve ICD-10 compliance on time (by Oct. 1, 2014) without destroying the organization. While ICD-10 is critical (not billing with ICD-10 is simply not survivable for most providers), this has become the “Y2K” for healthcare. Caution, particularly around involving physicians and mid-level providers in the minutiae of coding, is strongly advised.

5. Pursue transparency for quality outcomes and cost. Payors, employers and patients are all watching these very carefully, and organizations that are not forthcoming will become less favored over time.

6. Pursue transformation in long-term healthcare, including population health, chronic disease management and wellness. Fee-for-service is likely to become far less sustainable as a primary business model over time.

7. Reduce clinical variation, both by pursuing good evidence (where available) and by achieving agreement on leading practices among providers. Much of the variability in clinical care is not associated with improved outcomes, and some of it is actively harmful, both in cost and patient outcomes.

8. Recognize and honor the risk you own. Health systems have always “owned” the risk for charity and “self-pay” patients. The ones who recognize and accept this are much more likely to provide good care and keep costs under control.

9. Look for whole-patient (“accountable”) care opportunities within your own orbit. While the ACA set out the framework for accountable care organizations, the reality in 2013 is that these are still embryonic. Organizations that begin at home will be ready for risk-sharing moving forward.

10. Treat your IT expenditures as long-term investments, not expenses. Organizations should expect to spend an increasing percentage of capital dollars building technology assets. Acquire standards-based IT assets that will stand the test of time. Expect, plan and capture the hard- and soft-dollar returns from them. Organizations that view IT simply as an expense will forego future profits in the pursuit of short-term efficiency.

Avoid These Six Implementation Pitfalls to Achieve EHR Success

According to the 2014 Exclusive EHR Study conducted by the MPI Group and Medical Economics, 70 percent of clinicians said their EHR investment has not been worth the effort, resources, and costs. This whitepaper details six implementation pitfalls, and how to avoid them including:

1. Choosing the wrong EHR
2. Underestimating the importance of an implementation plan
3. Not enough training prior to go-live
4. Underestimating the importance of HIPAA Compliance
5. Falling behind on universal policies
6. Getting stuck on how you used to do thing

Identity verification is key for successful implementation of Direct messaging for MU2

An insightful article from Dr. Robert Rowley focusing on one of the key success factors to implementing a Direct messaging solution to meet the Transition of Care objective for Meaningful Use Stage 2.

Four critical Dimensions of Effective Mobile Health

The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, an arm of Deloitte Consulting, has issued a report “The Four Dimensions of Effective mHealth: People, Places, Payment and Purpose” discusses how mHealth strategies are not “one-size-fits-all.”