Healthcare IT News - May 2008 - (Page 4)

Healthcare IT News ■ May 2008 industry news www.HealthcareITNews.com Leavitt pledges continued focus on healthcare all healthcare quality stanHHS secretary he has “a dards used across its agencontinued sense of urgency” WASHINGTON – Department of cies and will publish them Health and Human Services and plans on picking up the in an effort to boost their Secretary Michael Leavitt said pace to drive much-needed market-wide use. HHS is HHS has no intention of slacking change. also experimenting with “I am among those who off in its efforts to drive transparcompetitive bidding for ency into the U.S. healthcare sys- believe our unbridled Michael Leavitt bundled services, begintem during the winding down of healthcare costs will bring our economic system to its knees,” ning with a Medicaid demo that the Bush Administration. HHS officials hope to expand in At the Fifth Annual World he said. Among initiatives in the works, the future, he said. Health Care Congress last month, NickT_Ad_8.125x10.625 272 days left5:02 Leavitt said1HHS is consolidating The Bush value-driven healthLeavitt said in his 4/15/08 as PM Page By DIana Manos, Senior Editor Manos Continued from page 3 care plan relies on healthcare IT adoption to record quality measures and provide cost and quality information to consumers, but adoption by small physician practices remains at 10 percent, Leavitt said. HHS plans in June to push Congress to tie physician Medicare payment incentives to the use of healthcare IT. ■ More at HealthcareITnews.com e Connect: LeaVItt 0508 ● “Before deploying the Dictaphone® EXSpeech® recognition system, our approach to creating documentation was inconsistent and inefficient. The costs and staffing pressures of maintaining a full-time transcription department were staggering. Now, 100% of our professional staff (i.e. 330 physical and occupational therapy clinicians) are dictating their reports with ease. We’ve seen transcription productivity gains as high as 55%! We’ve been able to eliminate the majority of our outsourcing. Report turnaround time has decreased from 1 - 2 weeks to less than 48 hours on average. Priority reports are being produced in just a few hours. We’re generating 450 to 700 reports daily. That’s possible because our Dictaphone system offers the flexibility to dictate by phone, wireless iPAQ®, and PC. That makes it easy to deploy across all of our existing locations and the new ones we’re adding all the time. Thanks to Dictaphone, patient documentation is no longer a burden for AthletiCo. Best of all, because Dictaphone EXSpeech has freed our staff from the mechanics of creating patient reports, they have more quality time available for our patients. The return on this technology investment has far exceeded my expectations. I’m confident that the rapid growth we’re experiencing is indicative of the value Dictaphone will bring in the future.” Vendors and other healthcare IT stakeholders met in April with Congressional staff to try and dispel what they called “privacy myths” concerning electronic health records. “People are scaring lawmakers about data flying around the Internet,” said Justin Barnes, board member of the Confidentiality Coalition and vice president of marketing at Greenway Medical Technologies. “You cannot Google patient health information stored in EHRs or in other secure HIT solutions.” The electronic health record industry is secure through market forces, Barnes said. Healthcare IT and electronic health record companies are inherently incentivized to use highest levels of security and encryption. No EHR company wants to lose their credibility; it would fold their company, he said. An aide to Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) conceded that there are “very different players” in this unfolding legislative scene, with a need to understand all sides. Patient privacy advocates serve an important role, the aide said. However, “as congressional staffers, we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We can have EHR uptake without leaving patient privacy on the wayside.” It seems the only truly new events regarding healthcare IT legislation this year are the deepening battle lines being drawn between hardline privacy activists and vendors creating healthcare IT they claim is perfectly safe. ■ More at HealthcareITnews.com e Connect: MaNoS 0508 ● workforCe Continued from page 3 Nick Tsatsis Chief Operations Officer AthletiCo Rehabilitation Fitness & Performance, Ltd. Chicago, Illinois ©2008 Nuance Communications, Inc. www.nuance.com /dictaphone | 1.800.350.4836, EXT. D698 trained in healthcare IT is essential to bringing greater quality and efficiency to the healthcare industry. “ “The need for IT professionals in health information technology (HIT) settings is large and will increase as more advanced systems are implemented,” Hersh and co-author Adam Wright concluded in their report. Wright is senior medical informatician in the Clinical Informatics Research & Development Group at Partners HealthCare in Boston. “If our data represent a correct sampling of the entire U.S. , then the current IT staff workforce is about 108,390 FTE (full-time equivalents),” the report said.“However, if the U.S. HIT agenda is fulfilled and hospitals move to higher levels of adoption, an additional 40,784 FTE will be required.” Hersh called for additional education and training for healthcare IT professionals. ■ More at HealthcareITnews.com e Connect: WorKForCe 0508 Speech-driven clinical documentation and communication for healthcare leaders™ e ● Connect: dICtapHoNe 0508 ● http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://HealthcareITnews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9153 http://www.nuance.com/dictaphone http://HealthcareITnews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9150 http://www.nuance.com/dictaphone http://HealthcareITnews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9149 http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9189

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Healthcare IT News - May 2008

Healthcare IT News - May 2008 Contents Help Wanted Speeding Up Government Silos Privacy Pressures Tracking Disease Rah Rah Health! TriZetto Suit Outcomes Watch Ambulatory EHRs

Healthcare IT News - May 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.