Most agree that HIE’s have the potential to eliminate redundant and often harmful medical procedures. Some suggest that HIE’s are a critical component for any organization offering valued-based care and pop health services.

Many organizations are attempting to show value by measuring the volume of transactions and some are trying to showing how HIE's can create greater efficiencies from a cost savings perspective. These efforts are likely to fall short of what’s truly needed.

Adopting the rigor of a continuous process improvement approach to measure the value of investments is necessary to ensure continued sustainability of HIE's - at the state and community level. This resource can help provide with the basic building blocks to get started and a roadmap to ensure future success

Release from HHS: The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) established the Quality Payment Program for eligible clinicians. Under the Quality Payment Program, eligible clinicians can participate via one of two tracks: Advanced Alternative Payment Models (APMs); or the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). We began implementing the Quality Payment Program through rulemaking for calendar year (CY) 2017. This rule provides proposed updates for the second and future years of the Quality Payment Program. DATES: To be assured consideration, comments must be received at one of the addresses provided below, no later than 5 p.m. on August 21, 2017. 

We live and work in a technology-driven, information-focused world. My colleagues and I are highly educated and trained; we spend our days interacting with the world through laptops, smart phones, and tablets. We are knowledge workers, not clerks, and most (but surely not all) of this technology-enabled work is professional and not clerical work. Why would we think physicians and other clinicians would also not be actively engaged with digital applications throughout their day?

NEW! eHI Interviews Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, Board of Trustees, American Medical Association (AMA) on the challenges of new technology and opportunities for the new administration to help transform care.

Susan Turney, Marshfield Clinic: “Just look at the number of patients using wearable devices or sharing information remotely with their physician offices…it’s important not just to get the info to the team but also important that they can analyze the information and report it back to the patient in a way that is impactful or helps their outcome. Probably the biggest barrier to [health technology] evolving further is the payment model…if we can have the payment model catch up with the delivery model we will be in a much better place… eHI has a huge voice in Washington. We are a small organization, but the representation from the stakeholders across industry has really helped us to think about what we are here for-- which is to serve the patient.”

Sam Ho, MD, Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, United Healthcare on policy  “There should be much more active collaboration between government policymakers and the private sector to remove the onerous and unnecessary policies, and promote policies that would let innovation and private sector solutions flourish…"

The House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate HELP Committee have engaged in a public, nonpartisan conversation with patients, researchers, innovators, and health care providers about what steps can be taken to expedite the discovery, development, and delivery of new treatments and cures and maintain America’s global status as the leader in biomedical innovation. The 21st Century Cures Act (“Cures”) is the product of that conversation.

On August 23, 2012, CMS announced a final rule to govern Stage 2 of the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs. The rule specifies the Stage 2 criteria that eligible professionals (EPs), eligible hospitals, and critical access hospitals (CAHs) must meet in order to continue to participate in the EHR Incentive Programs. The final rule for meaningful use Stage 2* intends to increase health information exchange between providers and promote patient engagement by giving patients secure online access to their health information.

Blog: Mark Segal, GE Healthcare - In Part 1 of this post, I provided an overview of the new Medicare Quality Payment Program (QPP) proposed in response to the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), which sets out a path to value-based Medicare physician payment. The CMS proposed rule implementing MACRA was released April 27; comments are due June 27. In Part 2, I summarize healthcare IT (HIT) implications of the QPP and provide my initial observation on the proposed rule.