Continuity of care, accountability of care, unlikely without Medicare Shared Savings and Meaningful Use health IT incentives for mental and behavioral health providers I could understand completely if many behavioral health providers and facilities feel like the proverbial red headed stepchild. All this energy and money poured into improving healthcare through comprehensive information technology (IT) systems and behavioral health is left holding an empty basket. Even with regard to
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Parity Not Apparent: There Is No Biopsy for Mental Illness
Getting legislation through Congress—often a monumental battle—is one thing. But implementing new laws may be a greater challenge simply because they require so much sustained energy and attention. Take mental health parity laws, for example. Congress passed the Mental Health Parity Act (MHPA) championed by Sens. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and Pete Domenici (R-NM) in 1996. The law prohibits employee-sponsored group health plans from charging more in a year or over a lifetime for mental health
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Addressing the Interoperability Gap in Behavioral Healthcare
What would you call a physician who sewed up a patient’s wound without addressing the depression, bipolar disorder or other behavioral health issue that led to the injury? We might cynically label the doctor disinterested or inattentive; we might sympathetically call her distracted or overwhelmed. But it might be far more accurate to say the doctor lacks information. With access to the patient’s complete health record when he came into the emergency department (ED), she
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Despite Closed EHR Records, Health IT is Joining the 21st Century
What’s the technical solution for the health IT interoperability challenge? Do you know? You probably should. Chances are you interact with it frequently. It’s Amazon, Expedia, Quicken, Concur, etc. Really, it’s just about any Web site that sells something and enables the use of a credit card. Think about it. You order a book and within moments Amazon’s massive database of partners, products and customers assesses stock availability and pricing, and then securely interacts with your
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Is Real Life Health IT Drama on Capitol Hill Like House of Cards?
In anticipation of House of Cards Season 4, and with all due respect to the show’s creators, I think real life is giving us a perfect plot line that includes politicians, corporate interests, their lobbyists and a big fat government contract. Maybe Francis and Claire have me seeing conspiracies everywhere, but it seems a chain of recent health IT events have created intrigue in what is historically our staid, conservative industry. Follow the timeline with me and decide for yourself if I’m
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Why Behavioral Health Acutely Needs EHRs
Exclusion from federal funding makes no clinical, economic or policy sense A show of hands: Who believes depression or bipolar disorder have no impact on the severity and treatment of a patient’s diabetes and COPD? It’s an idea no practicing physician would support. Yet time and again, we act as though mental illness and care can be kept separate from physical ailments. Take Meaningful Use (MU), for example. The federal government believes healthcare must move into the digital age and is
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Can Public APIs Unlock True Health IT Interoperability?
Do we finally have the spark? Interoperability is the current health IT buzzword because it’s the essential ingredient in creating a system that benefits patients, doctors and hospitals. Almost everyone in healthcare is pressing for it and is frustrated, though probably not surprised, that Meaningful Use did not get us there. The ONC says within three years we’ll have a roadmap for providing interoperability “across vendor platforms,” which should probably elicit a collective groan.
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Like Scorpions, Closed EHR Systems Cause Paralysis
Take a step back from the challenges that surround health information technology (HIT) interoperability and you will recognize that market forces and a desperately fragmented health care system make hospitals and vendors act the way we do. It calls to mind the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which is worth revisiting. Wanting to cross a river, a scorpion spies a frog in the water and asks for a ride to the other side. Naturally afraid of being stung and killed, the frog hesitates, but is
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EHR Design and Dissatisfaction: EHRs Should Create Time for Patients
Dr. Edmund Billings shares his insights on the growing trend of dissatisfaction with EHR design. As reported last year at HIMSS and by many online news and opinion sources since, physician dissatisfaction with EHRs is growing. Indeed, while this article does not focus on the broader picture, general physician career dissatisfaction is disconcertingly high. The breakneck push for more and better EHR use as a component of regular medical care is a significant part of that malaise, but it is
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The Squeeze Is On For U.S. Hospitals
Lots of financial scrambling, but the numbers still don’t add up Is healthcare a business? In the United States, the question has been asked time and again but never satisfactorily answered. By virtue of publically financed healthcare systems, the rest of the developed world has decided, to a greater or lesser extent, that medicine and healthcare are not pure businesses—that citizens have a right to care, even when they can’t pay all associated costs. It’s starting to look like Americans
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