Clinical labs should be tests for your patients, not a test of your patience.
Stop Digging Through Attachments in the EMR Media Tab
Financial impact of clinical data extraction software
How to redact PDF documents the truly proper way
Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement #6
How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process Blog #5: The IPRT Visit and Action Plan
3 Things To Do To Tame Your Backlog
How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process Blog #4
Previously we have discussed in general what happens when your center comes under regulatory scrutiny and what you can expect. Today, we will begin to look in greater detail at what a System Improvement Agreement (SIA) entails, the items that the hospital commits to fulfill and some strategies for addressing them.
A fax machine walks into a doctor's office...the not-so-funny joke about health information exchange
How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process #3: The System Improvement Agreement
The System Improvement Agreement (SIA)
In our previous post, we discussed what happens when your program receives a letter from either the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) or the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and your program's initial response. Today we will focus on what happens if CMS does not accept your mitigating factors application.
What do a road trip and health information have in common?
I recently spent three days driving across the northern Midwestern States and through a good part of Canada with a longtime friend as we headed to a once-in-a-lifetime wilderness adventure. As you might imagine our conversations spanning those 72 hours took as many twists and turns as did the roads we traveled. However, one saying my friend repeated several times stood out among many insightful remarks he’d made, “Your judgement is only as good as your information.“
Quality Reporting in the EMR
Despite massive adoption of electronic medical records over the past several years, the promise of easy and nearly effortless chart abstraction from electronic medical records enabled by an interconnected web of interoperable EMRs sharing standardized data has yet to be fully realized. You need to look no further than the media tab to see the evidence that we have yet to arrive at this Utopian future.
How to Navigate a Transplant System Improvement Agreement Process #2: You Received a Letter in the Mail, Now What?
Should you receive a letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the focus will likely be on a failure to meet one of the Conditions of Participation, most likely related to either graft or patient survival relative to expected results. Under the authority of 42 CFR §488.61, a transplant program may request that CMS consider mitigating factors in the re-approval process. There are three general areas that will be reviewed to determine whether a program can be approved based upon mitigating factors. These areas include, but are not limited to, the extent to which the outcome measures are met or exceeded, the availability of Medicare-approved transplant centers in the geographic area or extenuating circumstances that may have a temporary effect on the program's ability to meet the Conditions of Participation.
Can clinical data abstraction improve care quality?
Is EHR Interoperability Dead on Arrival?
Recently, Andy Slavitt, the CMS acting administrator, announced that CMS will likely end the Meaningful Use program this year.
Does that mean that the hopes of an internet-worked healthcare system that’s able to seamlessly share health information are completely dashed before interoperability truly got off the ground?