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Morning Headlines 12/27/13

December 26, 2013 Headlines 2 Comments

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Office of Inspector General (OIG) Extend Sunset Dates for Electronic Health Records (EHR) Subsidy Rules

CMS extends the sunset date on the Stark exception to December 31, 2021. The decision will allow hospitals to continue to finance EHR implementations for referring physician practices without breaking anti-kickback laws.

More partnerships between doctors and hospitals strengthen coordinated care for Medicare beneficiaries

123 new ACOs are announced, bringing the national total to 360.

MaineHealth increasing spending on software system that was involved with billing glitches

MaineHealth will increase the budget on its Epic install from $145 to $200 million. Bill Caron, president of MaineHealth, says that the health system underestimated the total cost of training all its staff on Epic, and acknowledges that it was a mistake to start the install at 600-bed Maine Medical Center, the systems largest hospital.  The additional funding will be used to provide end users additional Epic training.

EMR alert cuts sepsis deaths

Active surveillance alerts generated by the EHR at Mount Sinai Hospital (NY) have led to earlier detection of sepsis in its inpatient census, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in its sepsis mortality rate.



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Currently there are "2 comments" on this Article:

  1. Happy New Year to all at Histalk!

    SEPSIS WARNINGS: What a brilliant idea to use the EMR alerts to warn of incipient sepsis to solve the problem created by the hospitals that use technology that distances nurses and doctors from the patients and creates the silent silo syndrome.

    What is the problem that is solved? First, for at least 2 decades, the hospitals employed the low paid patient care techs to obtain the vital signs (to save money). The patient care techs have no idea what they are measuring and the RNs never see the vital signs cause the techs enter them in the medical record. Thus, the vital signs were depreciated to no longer being vital.

    Modern medical care now entails the tech hooking the patient to a machine that measures the vital signs (? accuracy) and transmits them directly to the EHR silos; where no one sees them (the silent silo syndrome) unless they specifically search for them (not to mention the user unfriendly presentations of the vital signs, devoid of any consideration of human factors).

    Q.E.D. The EMR is not doing anything that a good RN does not do, if the RN actually saw the vital signs!

  2. When I read of the ongoing softening of the Stark Laws to promote the dissemination of EHR technology, I reached for the anti emetics. This is the first step to physician obedience to the hospitals’ CEOs and puts them on the track to be employed by the hospital.

    Doctors are being sucked in to hospital control with no way out. It is a little known fact that the hospitals are now firing doctors at a high rate now that they have gotten control of the patients in the practice.

    Additionally, it facilitates the cut and paste fraud and upcoding by the doctors who try to please the admin by keeping their billing up to the goals.







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