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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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
The Death of Fee-for-Service in Healthcare
On April 16, 2015, President Obama signed into law H.R. 2, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015(MACRA), effectively sentencing Fee-for-Service (FFS) to death. The best explanation for how FFS is destroying the nation comes from Charles Munger, vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and ad-hoc health luminary, who is equating what American doctors do, to raising rattlesnakes so they can collect the bounty for dead rattlers offered by the government in an effort to combat a
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Behavioral Health: We Need EHRs, But incentives Would Help
Editor's Note: D'Arcy Gue is one of the co-founders of Phoenix Health Systems, a healthcare IT consulting and outsourcing firm. In April 2015, Phoenix welcomed a merger with Medsphere Systems Corporation and now serves as the vice president of industry relations for Phoenix Health Systems, the health IT services division of Medsphere.
Acute care hospitals have demonstrated what happens when you pay people—when you incentivize them—to do something.
Just 9.4 percent of
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Rebooting Meaningful Use: Is It Accomplishing Its Mission?
Editor's Note: Dr. Reid Coleman is the Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) for evidence-based medicine at Nuance.
Meaningful Use is an important set of criteria designed to improve quality and safety, but is it accomplishing its mission?
The proposed rules for Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 3 were just released by both CMS and the ONC. Many writers have commented on these rules, and this blog post is not a commentary about the rules. As always, I recommend readers go to John
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Healthcare On-Demand, Airbnb Style
If healthcare is becoming “cashified” as I previously discussed, and I am buying healthcare services on my own - I want an experience like Airbnb.
The realization came on a flight back from San Diego. We had just met with a potential investor who was incredibly interested in our startup, but who ultimately balked when he learned how long it takes health systems to make purchasing decisions. True enough, but a little oblique of our actual business model... Ah rejection, like a pair of fuzzy
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Want a Connected Healthcare System? You Are the Missing Key
Editor's Note: John H. Hammergren is chairman, president and chief executive officer of McKesson Corporation.
How often do we visit the doctor’s office and think, “This again?” when handed a long medical form to fill out? Don’t we all wonder why our medical information can’t be automatically transferred from our primary care physician to the specialist? Or to the hospital or outpatient surgery center?
The answer is this: we don’t currently have a national network of connectivity that
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Is Machine Interoperability the Next Unusable Level of Meaningful Use?
As the HIMSS15 extravaganza is getting under way, and every EHR vendor flush with cash from the Meaningful Use bonanza is preparing to take its unusable product to the next level, machine interoperability is shaping up to be the belle of the ball.
Interoperability in health care is all the rage now. After publishing a ten year interoperability plan, which according to the Federal Trade Commission(FTC) is well position to protect us from wanton market competition and heretic innovations, the
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Women’s Health Leader Dismayed by Proposed Changes to Meaningful Use Criteria
Debra L. Ness, President, National Partnership for Women & Families issues statement in response to the recently proposed modification to meaningful use for 2015 to 2017, released by CMS on Friday.
“The proposed modification to meaningful use for 2015 to 2017, released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on Friday, is a startling and unwelcome departure from the administration’s commitment to health care transformation that produces higher value, more patient-
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The Kabuki Dance Of “Blocking Data” In Healthcare
The lack of data interoperability in healthcare continues to plague and haunt the entire industry. Much of the challenge falls squarely in the realm of Electronic Health Record (EHR) software, but EHR software is by no means the only category where this challenge is directly affecting patient lives. I ‒ along with countless others ‒ have written extensively about this topic. Last year I did a 5‒part series on just "interoperability" which I published on Forbes. One piece highlighted the
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What If Air Travel Worked Like Healthcare?
HIT consultants will have their work cut out for them if the healthcare industry gets serious about solving EHR’s lack of interoperability. Billions of dollars would be spent building the same easy to use applications consumers enjoy in other industries like banking and travel.
Imagine if banks did not have applications to support mortgage processing! Everything has to be done via a manual process, moving the loan through different verifications and approvals through human
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