Electronic Health Record (EHR) information and news

The American Medical Association (AMA) has echoed an announcement from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services encouraging practices to participate in an EMR demonstration project that aims to prove the value of electronic records.

Physicians would receive payments during the five-year project for using certified EMRs to improve quality based on specific clinical measures. Bonus payments also would be made based on a standardized survey measuring the number of EMR functionalities a physician group incorporated into its practice. Total payments under the project could be up to $58,000 per physician or $290,000 per practice.

The deadline for applications is May 13, 2008. For more information, see the HHS press release.

The EHR selection process can be challenging. But after all of the work to select the right tool, you want to make sure that the selected electronic health record system is correctly installed, configured, and maintained without taking unnecessary time away from your practice.

Physicians Practice offers that the help you need—regardless of your “geek” quotient—may be an IT professional that focuses on your EHR and technology needs:

These days, with even toasters housing microchips, the question is not if you need IT support. You might be pretty tech-savvy yourself — what practice management consultant Rosemarie Nelson calls a “physician enthusiast.” And maybe you really do know how to fiddle with your wireless router to make it work. But do you truly have the vision, time, and IT skills necessary to streamline all your technologies so the practice’s data and capabilities are available to the right staff, at the right place, at the right time?

Read more at Physicians Practice in “Technology: Learning to Love Your Nerd.”

Software Advice, a site that focuses on helping generally non-technically oriented professionals determine what technology they should adopt, has written a guide on CCHIT Certification and its role within electronic health record (EHR) selection process.

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT®) has gained substantial momentum since the organization’s founding in 2004. As a result, buyers of electronic health records (EHRs) – or electronic medical records (EMRs), as they are also known - often ask me what role CCHIT certification should play in their purchase decision. The answer is not always simple, so I decided to explain what CCHIT is, what it is not, and why some participants have passionate views for or against it.

Software Advice sees CCHIT Certification as a valuable component of the selection process, but offers:

So, in the interest of serving our provider audience, here are five key takeaways for use in determining CCHIT’s role in your EHR selection:

• Review the CCHIT criteria yourself and determine the relevance of each to your ideal workflow. The criteria are well defined, so even if you do not need every capability, you could select a subset for use in evaluating EHRs for your practice.
• Understand the binary nature of CCHIT certification. If an EHR does not fully address each of the CCHIT requirements, it will not be certified. Therefore recognize that there are many good EHRs that may not achieve certification, but may still meet your requirements.
• Consider the requirements of your specialty. If you need EHR capabilities specific to your segment of medicine, realize that CCHIT does not yet cover specialties. You have to evaluate specialty requirements on your own.
• Do your homework on other critical evaluation criteria that fall outside CCHIT, including: ease-of-use, customer satisfaction and vendor viability. CCHIT is very clear that these due diligence items are the buyer’s responsibility.
• Understand the biases of both CCHIT proponents and detractors. It is natural for these industry players to have strong opinions, just be sure to put them in context, do your own research, and understand that the ultimate decision is yours.

If this sounds interesting, take some time to review the entire Software Advice guide on CCHIT Certification.

Hello, I’m Mark Leavitt, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the EHR Decisions website. I’m sure you’re wondering what this website is about, and why it has been launched. And, since you’re highly trained in reviewing evidence and making objective decisions, you also want to know who’s behind the information posted here and just how credible it is.

EHR Decisions is brought to you by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT). The Certification Commission is an independent, nonprofit organization with the mission of accelerating the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs or EMRs). By certifying products on the market, we hope to reduce the risk of investing in an EHR, to make sure it will be “interoperable” (able to connect up and receive or send patient data where you need it), and to protect the privacy of your patient records. We’re also working to encourage various health care players to offer financial assistance to physicians for adopting EHRs, with some notable successes to date. But I’ll save that for a later column.

So who am I? Well, I’ve been an engineer, been a practicing Internal Medicine physician, been an EHR company founder and CEO, but that’s all in the past. Right now, since helping found the Certification Commission in 2004, I’ve been enjoying the opportunity to contribute at the national level, working for the benefit of, well, pretty much every stakeholder in health IT, I hope. After all, we all end up as patients at some point in our lives, and if we want care that is high in quality, safe, and efficient, we need far better tools than paper files for managing our complex histories and assisting with our crucial health decisions.

The Certification Commission has been certifying EHR systems for doctors’ offices since May 2006. We’ve heard that this is starting to help physicians with EHR purchase decisions, but we’ve also heard that more help is still needed — and that’s the core purpose of this website. We’d like to help you better determine your own readiness for moving to electronic health records, get started on the selection process, and be wiser in the actual purchase and contract negotiations. Once you’ve invested, the actual installation and implementation become crucial factors in success. Finally, there will be advice on how you derive the full potential benefits from your EHR, from both a business and clinical standpoint.

We know your top challenge is having time to even think about EHRs. So we’ll experiment with different communications approaches and use what works best for you: short articles by experts, informal blogs, news feeds, community forums, even podcasts and videos if they prove helpful and popular. Our organization’s main website www.cchit.org has all the formal information about certification, while EHR Decisions will be more informal, topical, up-to-date, and community-based. Share your ideas about how we can best communicate, and what you’d like to know more about – just use the comments below.

Thanks for your interest!

The key to reducing U.S. healthcare costs, some argue, could lie in the adoption of electronic health records (EHR).

“Americans spend an extraordinary amount of money each year on health care, but unfortunately access and quality of care is frequently marginalized by the inefficiencies and errors in the system,” said Senator Judd Gregg in front of the Senate Budget Committee.

In addition to holding down costs, improved electronic record-keeping and communications would reduce medical errors, lead to better care and give decision-makers more data to evaluate the effectiveness of different treatments, Gregg said.

In similar testimony, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse cited studies that estimated health IT could help the medical community save between $81 billion and $346 billion annually.

The San Mateo healthcare system Northern California has signed a deal with eClinicalWorks, makers of CCHIT Certified Ambulatory 2007 EHR eClinicalWorks 7.6.15, to acquire licenses for the its EMR system.

“San Mateo Medical Center is always looking for innovative ways to improve care for the people of San Mateo County,” said CJ Kunnappilly, vice president and medical director of quality management at San Mateo Medical Center. “Part of our goal for implementing an ambulatory electronic medical records system is to track chronic care measures, including hypertension and diabetes.”

For more, see Healthcare IT News.

According to an article by Medical Economics, Michigan physicians who use EHR may qualify for reduced premiums:

MHA Insurance in Lansing, MI, will discount premiums by 5 percent the first year and 2.5 percent afterwards for practices that have an EHR certified by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology. Two more strings are attached—the system needs to have been up and running for at least one year, and at least 75 percent of the doctors in a practice must use it.

For more information, see “Another reason to go digital—cheaper malpractice coverage.”

HHS has earmarked $150 million in funding for its new “National EHR Demonstration” project, to help physicians underwrite the costs of investing in EHR. Eligible physician practices will be willing to:

• Invest in and use an EHR system certified by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology
• Gather and report quality data to CMS
• Deliver high-quality health care to patients based on national standards

HHS Secretary Leavitt is anxious to add additional practices to the program:

“I have 12 flags I’m going to plant someplace in America, and with those flags come 100 smaller flags,” said Leavitt, referring to the 100 small- and medium-size physician practices he wants each of the communities designated as Chartered Value Exchanges to recruit to the EHR demonstration project.

Ultimately, up to 1,200 physician practices from various regions of the country — all affiliated with Chartered Value Exchange communities — will be chosen to participate in the pilot.

For more information on the program, see the AAFP’s coverage of the project.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) is seeking a budget increase. And part of that budget includes incentives for physicians who adopt EHR:

[T]he budget proposes $3.8 million for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to fund the second year of a demonstration project to offer financial incentives for as many as 1,200 physician practices to adopt certified electronic health records systems.