Health IT program needs ID management

Privacy becomes an issue with electronic health records

The Obama administration’s drive to implement electronic health records (EHRs) should have strong identity management tools to ensure privacy and security of the records, members of a panel of providers, vendors and policy experts said today.

The coming health information technology policies and standards are to include protections for patient privacy and security and safeguards against medical identity theft. Achieving those goals could be advanced by identity management tools, such as strong authentication standards and smart cards, according to panelists at an event in Washington today organized by the Smart Card Alliance and the Secure ID Coalition. Both groups represent vendors of identity management programs.

For example, patients checking in to Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City are assigned a smart card that contains their photograph and a digital summary of recent clinical information. By delivering the information to doctors providing care, the card helps improve care and reduce medical errors. The card also has proven to be critical in reducing fraud and identity theft, which in turn decreases errors in payments and in patient care, said Paul Contino, vice president of IT at Mount Sinai.

“If you don’t catch the errors at the registration desk, you will see dramatic effects downstream,” Contino said. “If you are going to spend money on health IT, you need the right identification standards.” Without strong ID management, care records are likely to have errors because of false identities, misspelled names, duplicative names and other problems. Even a single error, such as a wrong blood type listed on a patient’s record due to a mix-up with another person’s identity, can lead to catastrophic consequences for a patient, he said.

Congress approved spending $17 billion in incentives for doctors and hospitals that install and use health IT systems as part of the economic stimulus law. The Health and Human Services Department is drawing up standards and policies to distribute payments to providers who can show meaningful use of health IT. HHS also is setting up a framework for secure exchange of the health data and the department’s national coordinator for health IT on May 15 released a road map for creating the standards and policies under the stimulus law.

One standards will involve controls on access to patient records. The leakage of private medical information can affect a patient’s employment, housing and insurance status, and because of that extreme sensitivity, medical information requires more than a password for secure handling, said Michael Magrath, director of business development for North America for Gemalto Inc.

“Health information exchanges and regional information exchanges will be targeted by hackers,” Magrath said. “I have strong concerns about the prospect of minimum standards,” such as passwords alone. Identity authentication standards for receiving medical care and handling medical data should require a password and also use of some type of identity token or certificate issued by a third party, he said.

Ideally, patients would be in charge of — and would have complete access to — all of their health records, said William Yasnoff, managing partner of the National Health Information Infrastructure Advisors consulting firm.

E-prescription boost for 1,800 hospital beds

The ePrescribing and Medicines Administration (EPMA) system will manage medicines for the more than 1,800 hospital beds at Heartlands, Solihull and Good Hope hospitals, as well as their take-out prescriptions.

The system includes access to the Multilex Drug Data File database, which allows clinicians to check how drugs will interact with each other, potential duplicate therapies and allergies that can be triggered by certain medications.

Niall Poole, electronic prescribing project manager at Birmingham’s Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, said in a statement: “E-prescribing minimizes the risk of medication errors in many ways: from the very basic, such as producing legible prescriptions which are not subject to the difficulties and potential dangers of reading and interpreting handwriting, to the very advanced such as drug-interaction information at the point of prescribing.”

Plan Outlines Medicare/Medicaid Incentives

The Department of Health and Human Services has released the outlines of the program to offer Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments for meaningful use of electronic health records systems.

The payments are authorized under the economic stimulus law. Medicare incentives to eligible hospitals will start in October 2010, HHS has clarified. Medicare incentives to physicians, as well as Medicaid incentives to physicians and hospitals, will start in January 2011.

By the end of 2009, HHS expects to:

1. coordinate with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to develop related policies for the incentive programs, such as the definition of meaningful use;
2. develop proposed rules to allow public input to the incentive program policies;
3. plan systems and other requirements to support the incentive programs; and
4. plan a national outreach program.
5. By the end of 2010, HHS expects to:
6. conduct outreach to eligible professionals and providers and to state Medicaid agencies;
7. develop systems to support the payment of incentives;
8. develop final rules to establish policies to pay incentives; and
9. develop systems to monitor and evaluate incentive payments.

Maryland law will allow state to put stimulus cash toward electronic health records

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley will sign legislation Tuesday that provides incentives for health care organizations to implement electronic health records.

House Bill 706 allows the state to make use of federal stimulus dollars available for electronic health records and coordinate those efforts with the state’s own plan to create a state wide health information exchange.

The federal stimulus money provided $19 billion toward electronic health records. State health officials do not know how much of that money will flow to Maryland.

State and federal health officials are pushing electronic health records because they believe they will reduce medical errors and lower costs by eliminating the need for running multiple tests.

The stimulus package enables physicians to receive incentives between $44,000 and $64,000 over the next five years through Medicare and Medicaid.

It costs, on average, $50,000 for a physician practice to implement electronic health records. The incentive payments begin in 2011, and physicians who do not adopt an electronic health records will be penalized through lower Medicaid and Medicare payments starting in 2015.

In the past, the biggest obstacle in getting physicians to install an electronic health record was cost. The federal stimulus money and the state’s health information exchange overcomes that obstacle by providing incentives to adopt health records.

“It’s trying to create a business model to make [health IT] work,” Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Secretary John Colmers said.

While the federal money provides payments to physician practices, the state is taking its own steps to ensure that hospitals can share electronic information. The legislation requires the Maryland Health Care Commission and the Health Services Cost Review Commission to designate a state health information exchange by Oct. 1. State health insurers will provide incentives to hospitals, which include a lump sum payment or increased reimbursement, to adopt electronic health records.

Erickson Retirement Communities, Johns Hopkins Medicine, University of Maryland Medical System and more than a dozen companies and health care institutions have submitted their own plan to the state’s health care commission to create a health information exchange, known as the Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients.

American College of Cardiology Supports E-Prescription Mandate

The American College of Cardiology is separating itself from a number of other physician groups by favoring a mandate for Medicare physicians to adopt electronic prescriptions, Modern Healthcare reports.

ACC said it supports the mandate because it has moved quicker than other physician groups in embracing e-prescribing. Many cardiologists are part of large physician practices that already have adopted the technology, Jack Lewin, CEO of ACC, said.

A Senate Medicare bill likely will include a financial penalty for physicians who do not adopt e-prescribing technology, Modern Healthcare reports.

ACC supports increased reimbursements for e-prescribing rather than cuts. In a recent letter to the Senate Finance Committee, the group urged Congress to set the e-prescribing adherence deadline for Dec. 31, 2011.

“We’ve learned from those early adopters that we’re seeing actual cost savings, in addition to improving patient safety,” Lewin said.

Medical Billing Outsourcing Benefits

Your practice gains substantial benefits when it hires a medical billing outsourcing firm. By hiring a medical billing outsourcing firm, you free your self and your staff from the paperwork headaches of the reimbursement claims process.

By hiring a medical billing outsourcing firm, you are able to expedite income generation. Your reimbursement claims can be paid within 7-14 days. Paper claims are processed electronically to check for errors, and a bigger percentage of claims will be paid.

By hiring a medical billing outsourcing firm, you eliminate non-productive office hours. For the medical billing, outsourcing firm handles the non-core activities like billing and coding functions.

Some basic services a medical billing outsourcing firm does:
A medical billing outsourcing firm helps you integrate patient accounting functions and help with the pay follow up services. They will even facilitate third-party and bad debt follows up services.
A medical billing outsourcing firm helps you maximize your cash revenue by handling the management and liquidation of your accounts receivables.
A medical billing outsourcing firm will take over the responsibility of interacting with your patients.

Healthcare, Online Medical Transcription and Medical Billing: What's Involved?

Anyone who watches the evening news or picks up a national news magazine will recognize one thing to be true: Healthcare has become one of the fastest growing industries in the United States.

With such an explosion of the healthcare industry taking place, more and more people are embarking on careers in the healthcare system in two fields that have logically benefited from this growth: medical transcription and medical billing. These two fields compose vital organs of the medical industry body itself. To participate in such a necessary field will be both challenging and rewarding, as these fields continue to grow and evolve.

What exactly is medical transcription?

Medical transcription, also known as “MT,” is a healthcare profession which involves the converting voice-recorded reports as dictated by doctors and other healthcare professionals into text format. This is most often done on a PC, using a data entry program. Often this type of position can be done from home, widening its appeal to those with both financial needs and a need to remain at home due to family constraints. Likewise, taking the medical transcription courses online is a natural transition to working from home.

And what exactly is “medical billing”?

Medical billing has become one of the most popular careers in the nation. HMOs, PPOs, managed care, and private physicians need employees to process the claims forms and other paperwork associated with insurance plans, strictly adhering to procedural protocol between the insurance companies and the medical provider. As a result, the medical billing specialist must be detail-oriented, have a precise and detailed work style, and understand the complexities of insurance billing.