Somehow, as a 20 year pediatrician, I have had a charmed life as it relates to the big C. Of course, my residency training at St Louis Children's Hospital had many months on the pediatric cancer wards, bone marrow transplant patients, the works. In my many years of general practice, cancer is but a tiny portion of my outpatient medicine experience. I read once that statistically we "get" a Pre-B Cell ALL every seven years. Poor little ones with T Cell Lymphoma, Burkitt's Lymphoma, and
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Providers Name Optimizing IT/EHR Performance as Top Challenge in 2018
With true implementation beyond a system go live, optimizing IT/EHR performance (32 percent) and overcoming IT staff shortages (31 percent) were cited almost equally as the most significant challenges in 2018, according to the sixth annual Health IT Industry Outlook Survey conducted by Stoltenberg Consulting Inc. The report reveals 40 percent of health IT leaders rated measuring improvement in patient care quality as the top business objective in 2018, followed by identifying areas of cost
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MACRA: The Yardstick for Quality that Health Systems Need
The number of quality initiatives is rapidly rising in the healthcare industry as stakeholders shift their focus toward the value of patient care. In addition, with the recent implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), the rules surrounding healthcare reimbursement are being rewritten, incentivizing healthcare providers to prioritize the quality of patient visits over the quantity.Historically, it has been difficult to achieve consensus on defining quality;
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3 Ways MACRA is Changing Physician Payment in Medicare
The entry of the MACRA proposed rule, a little more than a year back, flagged a solid and remarkable consent to move towards esteem-based care, yet up to this point, a hefty portion of the subtle elements encompassing how it would be executed stayed obscure.In any case, a week ago, CMS discharged about 1,000 pages that shed light on how a doctor can improve their payments by following MACRA proposed rule.History Before MACRA proposed rule was introduced, specialists were paid for giving
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Survey: Less Than 1 in 4 Physicians Are Well Prepared to Meet MACRA Requirements
Fewer than one in four physicians involved in decision making related to quality reporting (QPP) were well prepared to meet MACRA requirements this year, according a joint report from KPMG and the American Medical Association. The KPMG/AMA report is based on a survey of 1,000 physicians about MACRA and their overall readiness to comply with the law that will change how many doctors get paid. What is MACRA?January 1, 2017 marked the beginning of the first performance year of the Quality Payment
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Revenue Integrity: Realizing the Promise of Hospital/Physician Integration
Editor's Note: Dan Ward is the VP of Strategy at ZirMed, a company empowering healthcare organizations to optimize revenue and population health with an end-to-end platform of cloud-based financial and clinical performance management solutions. HIT consultants see firsthand the growing pains of health systems as they increasingly purchase or partner with physician practices. While the aim is to increase efficiency, avoid duplication, lower costs and improve care, the reality is often very
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Survey Reveals Physicians Accelerating Adoption of Medicare’s Chronic Care Management Program
Following a slow start, U.S. physician groups have significantly accelerated their adoption of a key federal program aimed at improving the care of Medicare patients with chronic disease, while they remain relatively in the dark about the details of the 2015 law that the program has come to support.Forty-one percent of physician groups have launched a Chronic Care Management (CCM) program that meets the requirements for reimbursement by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Management (CMS),
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Survey: 64% of Healthcare Organizations Still Underprepared For MACRA
More than half of healthcare providers (64 percent) are “unprepared” or “very unprepared” for managing and executing Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) initiatives, according to the 5th annual Health IT Industry Outlook Survey conducted by Stoltenberg Consulting Inc. The survey was conducted at the 2017 Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference in Orlando included participants from practice management, project management, director and c-suite
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With MACRA Rule, What’s Next for Meaningful Use in 2017?
Editor's Note: Michael Nusimow is the CEO and Co-founder of drchrono, an EHR, practice management, medical billing and healthcare API platform that focuses on iPad, iPhone and web. Michael has been working in information technology for over 15 years and implemented components of the Bloomberg Terminal, used by customers worldwide. Despite all of the changes happening in healthcare legislation over the past few years, 2017 is not looking any easier. It is easy to get confused with the
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AMA Unveils MACRA Payment Model Evaluator for Physicians
With physicians facing the most notable changes in Medicare in a generation, the American Medical Association (AMA) has unveiled several online tools to help physicians through pending Medicare payment and delivery changes and to improve their opportunity for success under the new program that will go into effect in 2017.These new tools were designed to build on earlier, significant AMA efforts to ensure that physicians and their practices are prepared for MACRA: The MACRA webpage on the AMA’s
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