David Blumenthal

Commercial Insurance Implementing Meaningful Use

The HITECH Law Blog had a post recently titled “Commercial Payors Implementing EHR Meaningful Use Criteria in P4P Programs.” Here’s a short excerpt: On August 5, 2010, four major commercial health insurance payors participated in the Health Industry Forum in Washington, D.C., to discuss private industry collaboration with the United States Health & Human Services Department (HHS) to support providers in the adoption of certified electronic health records (EHRs). Leading the Forum’s panel discussion was David Blumenthal, M.D., Chief of the Office of National Coordinator of HIT. All four payors will include the Meaningful Use criteria in their pay for performance (P4P) programs. The 4 insurance groups identified are Aetna, Inc and its subsidiary, ActiveHealth Managent, United Health Group (UHG), Wellpoint, Inc, and Highmark, Inc. (Blue Cross Blue Shield). The author of the blog also asserts that now that the government has created the final meaningful use rule, it will clear the way for the commercial payors to implement it as well. The press releases from the 4 companies about this change are really vague and so it’s hard to say exactly how these companies will implement the meaningful use criteria. In fact, this almost feels like it’s a little warning shot from the commercial payors. It seems like they’re testing the waters to see how doctors and practices will react to this type of announcement. Plus, I’ll be surprised if we see any major implementation of meaningful use by commercial payors until we see the first physicians showing meaningful use to the government. That way the commercial payors can sit back and watch the impact on physicians of having to show meaningful use to the government. If it goes poorly (like the bad PQRI incentives), then I can see commercial payors backing off the meaningful use bandwagon. The theme I did read in all the press releases is that it’s valuable for commercial payors to have information from an EHR. Now I think the payors are just trying to figure out the best way to achieve that outcome. Will it be meaningful use? Will it be some other method? They don’t really care. They’re just concerned with their outcomes. If commercial payors do require meaningful use, I think it’s going to be a really ugly outcome. Related posts: Predicting HHS Meaningful Use Guidelines UPDATE: I just learned that ONC is doing a call... Private Payers and Meaningful Use Is it time for Private Payers to join in on... Some Pointed Thoughts on Meaningful Use I’ve been promising some more detailed coverage on Meaningful Use...

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Official ONC and CMS Conference Call on EHR Stimulus Programs

The “Official” ONC/CMS Audio conference call on the EHR stimulus programs. Don’t want to miss this one! ONC Certification and Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs: Final Rules How will they impact you? The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) together with The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) invite you to join us for an Audio Training on the Final Rules for ONC Certification and Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs. Learn about: • The Benefit of HIT • Summary of the final rules o ONC temporary certification process o ONC initial set of standards and implementation specifications o Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentives Programs including the initial definition of meaningful Use • Where to find additional resources Hear first hand from ONC and CMS Experts! Date: Thursday, July 22, 2010 Time: 2:00-3:30 pm EST Call in information Dial: 1-877-251-0301 Conference ID pass code: 87841621 Materials will be made available prior to the training at the following web address: http://www.cms.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms/05_Spotlight_and_Upcoming_Events.asp Be sure to visit CMS’ web section on the Medicare & Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs at: http://www.cms.gov/EHRIncentivePrograms/ Thanks to Charles Phelps from MedXSolutions for the tip. Related posts: It’s Official…Drummond Group to Apply as EHR Certifying Body The Drummond Group has just officially announced on their blog... Meaningful Use Final Rule Published This morning HHS held a live webcast (I guess it’s... EMR Stimulus, Selection and Implementation Conference I’ve started talking with some people about putting together an...

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Meaningful Use Final Rule Thoughts

As you can imagine my inbox has been kind of blown up with all the people talking about the final meaningful use rule. It’s going to take a bit to really digest what the final rule will mean for healthcare and EMR in general. I’m still trying to digest everything that’s been said and the 864 pages of the meaningful use rule (seriously, that’s longer than most books I read). Later today I’ll be posting a list of links to the various meaningful use articles and summaries I find on EMR and EHR . I think that will become a really valuable resource since a lot of people have done a lot of digging into the rule already. While I still have some concerns about how doctors will or will not take to the meaningful use rule and the EMR stimulus money, I have to admit that HHS did scale back some of the requirements rather significantly. I’ve always found David Blumenthal and the other people at ONC to be sincere people that were trying to make a sincere effort to make this work. I think the changes to the meaningful use rule reflect this sincerity also. Of course, the million dollar question is what will doctors think? There going to be inundated with information. I’m pretty sure a lot of doctors aren’t going to know which way is up and will be sitting out at list the first round of fun to see how their colleagues who take the meaningful use plunge fair first. Also, here’s the 864 pages of the meaningful use final rule for those who want to go to the source: If you want to see the HHS dog and pony show that you missed yesterday, I’ve embedded the video of the press conference for meaningful use below: Related posts: Meaningful Use Final Rule Published This morning HHS held a live webcast (I guess it’s... Thoughts on EHR Certification Criteria Interim Final Rule Time for a break from the regularly scheduled HIMSS programming... HIPAA Breach Notification Final Rule Released By HHS Yes, this website is called EMR and HIPAA, but as...

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Meaningful Use Final Rule Published

This morning HHS held a live webcast (I guess it’s a news conference?) announcing the final meaningful use rule . Unfortunately, it was a little early for me on the west coast (the life of a blogger), but I caught the second half of the webcast. Seems like they have made some changes to the meaningful use program. The most notable I think are the drop in percentage of ePrescriptions that are required (now at 40% I believe) and the mandatory and ala carte meaningful use requirements. I’m really interested to look into how they’ve implemented the second option. I believe this is how they’re trying to deal with the problems of meaningful use and specialties. So, hopefully the mandatory meaningful use requirements will be those that apply to ALL specialties and then the ala carte items can be customized to each specialties needs. I’m sure I’m missing some other notable details. I’ll do what I can over the next week to look over the documents and the other meaningful use coverage on the web to bring you more analysis on the announcement. In the mean time, it looks like CMS has published a website on the EHR incentive programs . They even have this page on Meaningful Use which includes the download of the Meaningful Use final rule. Related posts: Thoughts on EHR Certification Criteria Interim Final Rule Time for a break from the regularly scheduled HIMSS programming... HIPAA Breach Notification Final Rule Released By HHS Yes, this website is called EMR and HIPAA, but as... HIPAA Enforcement Security Rule Final Publish The HIPAA enforcement rule is published. Rick Brady mentioned that...

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HIMSS 2010 Day 4

Once again, you can go and check out many of the tweets I did during my various activities at HIMSS on my two twitter accounts: @techguy and @ehrandhit . The day started with the Blumenthal keynote. I can’t say that he really said anything earth shattering. It was a bit interesting to hear an overview of his perspectives. However, my favorite part of his speech was his opening story about how he got involved in healthcare IT and the time when he was a doctor and his EMR saved him from making a major medical mistake. It was really smart of him to tell a story like this. He also had some really good one liners (see my twitter accounts) that indicate his goals. So, I guess the David Blumenthal HIMSS keynote wasn’t completely meaningless . Then, the rest of the afternoon was fantastic since I was able to spend almost the entire rest of the day roaming the floor. I had a number of interviews with vendors on the floor, but it was nice to just be able to be on the floor and learning in the booths. I think that some people don’t like it, but I really like browsing through the mayhem. I love seeing the message people are trying to send. I won’t go into all the details of people I talked to, but will be posting about them over the next couple weeks. I did get a number of videos that I think people will really enjoy. I will just quickly mention the coolest swag I got. One place was handing out candy bars. I love chocolate so that was a big deal. Practice Fusion was fantastic since they treated me like a rock star for some reason and they gave me a cool jersey shirt. Very nicely done. I also got a $25 amazon gift certificate from Nuance thanks to seeing a tweet to go to their booth. Twitter definitely pays off. However, the best giveaway I got was the Econo-keys completely waterproof keyboards. Yes, that’s right. You can actually clean these keyboards. The best news about this free swag is that I got a few of these keyboards to give away to readers of this site. So, watch for the video of these keyboards and an opportunity to get your own washable, flexible keyboard. They’re super cool. Ok, enough about the swag. Sorry if you don’t like these summary posts. I’ll plan on posting more substantive posts tomorrow. For now, I’m going to bed. 15 hour days wear you out. Related posts: 2010 New Media Meetups at HIMSS I’m excited to announce a number of meetups at HIMSS... Virtual Healthcare IT Conference by HIMSS One night this week I decided to take a look... My Major HIMSS 10 Event Plans I’ll admit that I’m having an interesting challenge figuring out...

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