Information from HIMMS Summit Meeting

HIMSS Chair Kicks Off Conference by Touting Necessity of Health ITFebruary 26, 2007The health IT industry should stop debating the value of electronic health records and accept the technology's importance in the future of health care, Buddy Hickman, chair of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society board, said on Monday in his opening remarks at the annual HIMSS conference in New Orleans, Healthcare IT News reports."Placing the focus on quality, patient safety and necessary clinical process improvements is consistent with HIMSS' mission and with the reasons why adoption of [health IT] was strongly recommended by the Institute of Medicine's Crossing the Quality Chasm report," Hickman said.Hickman also encouraged the industry to have a unified voice on goals, policies and messages,...

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Further Cutbacks Proposed by Bush

Featured in: RHIO MonitorPresident Bush's new proposals for cutbacks to Medicare and Public Health Funding will impact RHIO development Further Barriers to Implementing RHIOs Submitted by gmlevinmd123 on Mon, 02/19/2007 - 9:41am. The catch 22 of Pay for Performance. The health insurance industry as represented by IHA is big on P4P and medicare is following suit without waiting for health IT to catch up so that it can be implemented properly.. At the same time it is espousing paying MDs for improving quality the administration defocuses and presents these new proposals. Write your Congressman!!Physicians not only pay a fair share of taxes, but are now being asked in some states (California-Schwarzzenegger proposal) to pay a 2% surtax at the state level to fund expansion of insurance to the...

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Help

Congress has officially approved of CMS’ decision to implement P4P. I recently read somewhere that CMS would increase physician reimbursements (and hospitals, too I suppose) by 300 million dollars with this incentive (if providers are able to conform to their requirements) I also read that physicians such as myself will not face the 5% annual SGR reduction in CMS payments. This has been massaged into the politically correct phrase as a “raise in reimbursements” (the lord giveth and the lord taketh away). So we are given back that which was taken from us and then told it is a “raise”.Let’s face it, decision makers in Washington and some state capitols as well as legislators are out of touch with reality. Placing more administrative burdens on an already very dysfunctional barely functioning...

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