Healthcare IT News - October 2007 - (Page 29)

www.HealthcareITNews.com phySIcIaN pRactIcES & aMBulatoRy caRE October 2007 ■ Healthcare IT News 29 mgma Continued from page 27 fRee Continued from page 27 exhibit hall,” Jessee revealed. “It will include vendor presentations on leading-edge healthcare IT products and services. There will be case studies and product demonstrations.” Jessee also noted that the conference program includes sessions on the National Provider Identifier (NPI) transition and the current status of the move to ICD-10 coding. “The ICD-10 transition will involve the overhaul of all EHR and practice management systems,” Jessee said. “This is going to be a major issue for our members.” A popular session from last year’s conference, the Certification William Jessee, MD for Healthcare Information Technology Forum, will be repeated in 2007. Robert Tennant, senior policy adviser for health informatics at MGMA, will headline the session along with Mark Leavitt, MD, chairman of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology. “The success of CCHIT owes a lot to Mark Leavitt’s ability,” said Tennant. “He does a wonderful job of selling CCHIT to the vendor community, and he understands that a critical audience for CCHIT is the practice administrators.” Tennant said Leavitt would explain the certification process, underscore the importance of CCHIT’s role, and address issues such as whether CCHIT will move toward requiring standards for administrative as well as clinical functionality in EHRs. MGMA has just recently added a breakout session on real-time claims adjudication, which Tennant and Jessee think will attract a lot of attention. “Real-time adjudication is gaining momentum,” Tennant said. “We’ll have a Robert Tennant number of health plan representatives attending who will talk about how practices can leverage that kind of technology. A practice’s workflow changes dramatically with a real-time system, and more of our members are asking how they can use technology to improve the administrative side of healthcare.” The conference will close with a speech by noted surgeon and New Yorker writer Atul Gawande, MD, whom Jessee called “one of the most thoughtful observers on healthcare today.” The 2008 MGMA Annual Conference will be held in San Diego. ■ More at Predictive informatics combines EHR data and genomic data in order to prompt physicians to take actions that ensure better outcomes. The company’s software and analytic tools are currently used by more than 1,000 physician prac tices, Kennedy said. “We build everything in a specialty-specific way, but we also have primary care practices using our software, mostly in the three- to 10-physician range,” said Kennedy. “They will be able to use the data to compare their practices to 10 ‘thought leader’ practices. We believe that predictive informatics will transform healthcare,” he added. But will free be cheap enough to convince physician practices to take RemedyMD’s offer? “Software licenses only repre- “Software licenses only represent about 10 pERcENt of the cost of implementing these systems.” – Thomas Handler, MD sent about 10 percent of the cost of implementing these systems,” said Thomas Handler, MD, research director at Gartner. “So I don’t think cost is the biggest barrier. A 10 percent reduction is not going to be enough to get most practices ‘over the hump.’” “I would be surprised if this made a big difference in the physician practice market for EHRs,” Handler concluded. “Although if RemedyMD provides really good clinical decision support, then it’s conceivable that there’s value in it.” More at HealthcareITNews.com e ●Connect: free 1007 HealthcareITNews.com e ● Connect: aLLSCrIPtS e ●Connect: MGMa 1007 http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=7845 http://www.allscripts.com/red http://www.allscripts.com/red http://HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=7846 http://www.healthcareitnews.com/eConnect.cms?id=7907

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Healthcare IT News - October 2007 Contents Global Harmony Telegrowth New Rules Keeping Tabs What's Free? PHR of Its Own Intelligent Closing Practice Management Paper Tiger

Healthcare IT News - October 2007

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