Healthcare IT News - January 2008 - (Page 34) 34 Healthcare IT News ■ January 2008 payERS www.HealthcareITNews.com record locator service and a patient referral service. “The first use of data is for treatment,” said Maggie Gunter, president and executive director. Beyond that, RHIOs can sustain themselves and build a business case for HIE by providing services to other entities. Aggregated reporting capability related to improving treatment would be valuable to health plans, said Gunter. With patient and provider consent for population use of data, RHIOs can track and provide aggregated reporting on health plans’ diabetes patients. The Long Beach Network for Health, or LBNH, is a coalition of healthcare providers and stakeholders tasked with providing quality healthcare for its community members through an HIE. Among its goals is to develop integrated virtual patient records to support any health event, said executive director Laura Landry. LBNH will also collect data in the foreseeable future, and will determine then how to best use the data for other services. ■ More at HealthcareITNews.com e Connect: NHIN 0108 NHIN Continued from page 31 Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (on left) joins CareSpark executive director Liesa Jenkins at the NHIN Forum. Despite the region having a $2,400 higher per capita patient care cost than other regions of the country, the region has extremely poor health outcomes, said executive director Liesa Jenkins. CareSpark’s mission, to improve the health status for the region, is being carried out through interoperable electronic health record adoption and regional health information exchange, or HIE, platform development on the healthcare IT side. “Value is derived from better medical decisions,” Jenkins said, and both clinician and payer understand that. CareSpark has developed clinical decision support services that the RHIO will deliver at the point of care. Payers and employers enroll their members and employees, respectively, to receive those services when visiting their physicians. “Payers said, if you could do that with clinical and claims data, we’ll pay for it,” said Jenkins. The Lovelace Clinic Foundation, a health services research organization based in Albuquerque, N.M., got 30 community partners together to develop an HIE network that includes a master patient index, a An event so amazing, you don’t have to be there to be there. And it’s all free. ● UnitedHealthcare, athenahealth get bullish on handling claims By BErNIE moNEGaIN, Editor MINNEAPOLIS - Insurer UnitedHealthcare April 23-24, 2008 www.himssvirtual.org REGISTER TODAY AT All the networking. All the education. All the exhibits. All at your desktop. All for free. Join us for an amazing opportunity! The HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo. It’s a perfect complement to our other outstanding events held throughout the year. Imagine an online, interactive, FREE event hosted by an organization with over 40 years of experience in healthcare IT. You and your staff can engage in educational sessions with original content, live Q&A and esteemed speakers. Visit a virtual exhibit hall, gather information on the latest breaking technology and chat with vendors. Interact live with other attendees. All at your desktop. No traveling. No time away from the office. Register now. It’s convenient. It’s free. It’s the HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo. and athenahealth, which provides Webbased business services for physician practices, are working together to expand the two companies’ real-time claim adjudication capabilities. This effort enables physician offices nationwide using athenahealth’s ondemand practice management service to submit UnitedHealthcare claims and receive a fully adjudicated response in seconds. Watertown, Mass. -based athenahealth submits more than 1.5 million claims a year to UnitedHealthcare and works with medical providers in 33 states. UnitedHealthcare first launched realtime claims processing in January 2007, using its dedicated physician Web site. Physician office staff submitting claims through the site can receive a fully adjudicated claim in seconds, reducing administrative burden and allowing patients to pay for services before leaving the doctor’s office, according to athenahealth executives. “In order to streamline the system for physicians and consumers, UnitedHealthcare is advancing technologies that operate on a single platform and can be used by anyone within the healthcare system,” said UnitedHealthcare CEO Ken Burdick. “We are helping to reduce costs for consumers and physicians and bringing the healthcare industry a step closer to a more retail-like environment.” Connecting real-time adjudication into athenahealth’s national physician platform expands UnitedHealthcare’s real-time capability to the critical practice management workflow and desktop space, which is an important advancement since most physician offices use third-party solutions or have to dualsubmit claims for traditional real-time adjudication platforms, according to athenahealth. More at HealthcareITNews.com e Connect: CLaIMS 0108 HIMSS | transforming healthcare through IT ™ ● http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=8428 http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=8432 http://www.himssvirtual.org http://www.himssvirtual.org http://HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=8432
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