Morning Headlines 4/1/14

Senate Approves ICD-10 Delay, ‘Doc Fix’

By a vote of 64 to 35, the Senate approves the "Doc Fix" bill, delaying the implementation of ICD-10 until October 2015, and preserving the current Medicare physician reimbursement rate for 12 months.

HealthCare.gov stumbles twice on deadline day

Healthcare.gov goes offline twice on its final day of registration, first due to heavy traffic, and then again due to software issues. Despite the problems, analysts tracking the registration numbers expect that the final count will come very close to meeting the original goal of seven million new registrations.

Appropriate Use of the Copy and Paste Functionality in Electronic Health Records

AHIMA calls for stronger technical and administrative controls over the use of copy and paste in EHRs, and recommends that the industry develop and publish best practices as a condition of its continued use.

Emergency Department Utilization: Update on Assumed Savings from Best Practices Implementation

A program in Washington state that tracks ED utilization rates for individual patients and alerts PCPs of frequent fliers results in a decrease in Medicaid ED visits and Medicaid narcotic prescriptions.