Modern Physician reports that "The pull-down menus, alerts and point-of-care information contained in computerized clinical decision-support systems [CDSS] can distract physicians from their face-to-face encounters and leave patients feeling ignored and dissatisfied with their care." This comes from a study at the University of Missouri at Columbia that evaluated patient perceptions of doctors using digital diagnostic tools.
"Get over it!" is the first thing that comes to mind. Would you begrudge your mechanic hooking up your car to the diagnostic computer and scrutinizing the bars and gauges and charts on the screen? The physician has to use tools, just like everyone else, to achieve peak performance in treating patients. Personally, I'd rather see the back of his head researching my complaint to take advantage of every inspiration and precaution, than to look at a smiling face telling me "Shucks, I don't know, let's try some drugs!"
The time has come for us as patients to embrace the new technology, just as we insist that our doctors do the best job possible in our behalf, and to get used to some changes in the doctor-patient relationship.
Showing posts with label physician. Show all posts
Showing posts with label physician. Show all posts
January 31, 2013
January 9, 2013
$1.25 Billion in December EHR Incentives
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that a record $1.25 billion was paid in December to hospitals, physicians and other professionals in electronic health-record (EHR) incentive payments. The program awards healthcare providers for adopting electronic health records systems.
The December pay out is three times the size of the previous largest one-month awards total. Medicare and Medicaid awarded $255 million to physicians and other professionals, and $1 billion to hospitals. So far, EHR incentive programs have paid out $10.3 billion to improve the quality of US healthcare information technology, which for decades has lagged behind other industries.
June 30, 2012
Population Healthcare Is Health Reform
Michael Christopher
Chief Chigger, CarePrecise Technology
We have heard many people say that the Affordable Care Act is not health reform, but an attempt at health insurance reform. But a broad shift in the focus and delivery of healthcare has begun, shaped in part by the ACA, and poised to bring significant change to American healthcare. At the heart of that change is population-based healthcare.
"With the Supreme Court upholding the ACA, we all now understand that population healthcare is what we're all going to be doing going forward," says Dr. Steven Davidson, senior vice president and chief medical informatics officer for New York's Maimonides Medical Center in a June 28 Modern Healthcare article. What is "population healthcare," what does it have to do with the Affordable Care Act, and what does it mean to industry vendors?
The term refers to "the ability to assess the health needs of a specific population; implement and evaluate interventions to improve the health of that population; and provide care for individual patients in the context of the culture, health status, and health needs of the populations" according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Population healthcare is a broadening of focus to see beyond the individual patient to the broad context of that patient's health issues, and to understand the issues of the patient's population to better serve both the individual patient and broader communities of patients.
This perspective becomes ever more critical when cost efficiencies are taken seriously into account, as they must be in an "affordable care" paradigm. In a Tufts Managed Care Institute's white paper on population health, we find
When viewed through the lens of health reform's quality focus, public health data collection and bringing the technologies that enable collection to every point of care, population healthcare is seen as a key - if not the key - strategy for both implementing the provider side of health reform, and rewiring its financial backbone of health insurance.
* Boland P., editor. Redesigning Heath Care
Delivery. Boland Health Care, Berkeley,
1996. pp. 159-163.
** Zeich R. Patient identification as a key to
population health management. New
Medicine. 1998;2:109-116.
Chief Chigger, CarePrecise Technology
We have heard many people say that the Affordable Care Act is not health reform, but an attempt at health insurance reform. But a broad shift in the focus and delivery of healthcare has begun, shaped in part by the ACA, and poised to bring significant change to American healthcare. At the heart of that change is population-based healthcare.
"With the Supreme Court upholding the ACA, we all now understand that population healthcare is what we're all going to be doing going forward," says Dr. Steven Davidson, senior vice president and chief medical informatics officer for New York's Maimonides Medical Center in a June 28 Modern Healthcare article. What is "population healthcare," what does it have to do with the Affordable Care Act, and what does it mean to industry vendors?
The term refers to "the ability to assess the health needs of a specific population; implement and evaluate interventions to improve the health of that population; and provide care for individual patients in the context of the culture, health status, and health needs of the populations" according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Population healthcare is a broadening of focus to see beyond the individual patient to the broad context of that patient's health issues, and to understand the issues of the patient's population to better serve both the individual patient and broader communities of patients.
This perspective becomes ever more critical when cost efficiencies are taken seriously into account, as they must be in an "affordable care" paradigm. In a Tufts Managed Care Institute's white paper on population health, we find
"Population-based care involves a new way of seeing the masses of individuals seeking health care. It is a way of looking at patients not just as individuals but as members of groups with shared health care needs. This approach does not detract from individuality but rather adds another dimension, as individuals benefit from the guidelines developed for the populations to which they belong.* Members with a particular disease must be prioritized so that disease management interventions are targeted toward those members most likely to cost-effectively benefit.**"The Affordable Care Act package as it now stands places the emphasis on results, rather than on specific means to obtain results. Despite what has been said by opponents, providers are given wide freedom in achieving improved quality and reach of care, and are provided with new resources, such as advanced electronic health records, paid for in part by the taxpayer. Population healthcare is a strategy for deploying these resources and creative latitudes, in a package of practical tactics and achievable objectives, and at scale.
When viewed through the lens of health reform's quality focus, public health data collection and bringing the technologies that enable collection to every point of care, population healthcare is seen as a key - if not the key - strategy for both implementing the provider side of health reform, and rewiring its financial backbone of health insurance.
* Boland P., editor. Redesigning Heath Care
Delivery. Boland Health Care, Berkeley,
1996. pp. 159-163.
** Zeich R. Patient identification as a key to
population health management. New
Medicine. 1998;2:109-116.
June 29, 2012
Now We Know: Time to implement the Affordable Care Act
As the Tennessee Medical Association puts it, there is now a "certain finality" to the Affordable Care Act following the Supreme Court decision upholding the law. A huge win for the Obama administration, the decision yesterday was like kicking a hornet's nest among conservatives. The Christian Medical Association said the decision "sounds an alarm across the country to people with faith-based and pro-life convictions" and called on Congress to repeal the law.
An article in Modern Physician characterizes the response among physicians as "mixed," but the vast majority of our MD, DO, PA and RN contacts have come down strongly in favor of the law, in one case saying "The government did something right... 50 million healthier Americans is going to look pretty good here in a few years."
Whichever political side one is on, it is now clear that work can move forward on implementing the law. The Tennessee Medical Association's statement concluded "Today's decision allows us to make more definitive plans regarding reforms to our healthcare system in Tennessee." The sentiment seems to be fairly widespread through the provider side of the industry.
Some states - among them our own Oklahoma - elected to refuse federal funding ($54 million in Oklahoma's case) to establish health insurance exchanges. The decision, taken on the part of Governor Mary Fallin, appears to have been politically motivated, but Oklahoma is, in fact, developing an exchange, without the federal dollars. An agency head, speaking with an Oklahoma radio station, said "It would have been good to have the money, so we could have a more user friendly and effective system, but we'll have something, anyway."
The justices struck down provisions in the law that would empower the federal government to force states to comply with the planned Medicaid expansion or lose all of their Medicaid funding. Now states will be eligible for basic Medicare funding even if they choose not to accept the additional dollars to provide expanded care. Numerous states have sworn to refuse expanded Medicaid funding, but it remains to be seen whether any will ultimately deny this added coverage for hundreds of thousands of their citizens. The federal dollars are being offered with no required match for three years. Medicaid is often one of the biggest lines in states' budgets, and that share is growing as healthcare costs continue to rise.
An article in Modern Physician characterizes the response among physicians as "mixed," but the vast majority of our MD, DO, PA and RN contacts have come down strongly in favor of the law, in one case saying "The government did something right... 50 million healthier Americans is going to look pretty good here in a few years."
Whichever political side one is on, it is now clear that work can move forward on implementing the law. The Tennessee Medical Association's statement concluded "Today's decision allows us to make more definitive plans regarding reforms to our healthcare system in Tennessee." The sentiment seems to be fairly widespread through the provider side of the industry.
Some states - among them our own Oklahoma - elected to refuse federal funding ($54 million in Oklahoma's case) to establish health insurance exchanges. The decision, taken on the part of Governor Mary Fallin, appears to have been politically motivated, but Oklahoma is, in fact, developing an exchange, without the federal dollars. An agency head, speaking with an Oklahoma radio station, said "It would have been good to have the money, so we could have a more user friendly and effective system, but we'll have something, anyway."
The justices struck down provisions in the law that would empower the federal government to force states to comply with the planned Medicaid expansion or lose all of their Medicaid funding. Now states will be eligible for basic Medicare funding even if they choose not to accept the additional dollars to provide expanded care. Numerous states have sworn to refuse expanded Medicaid funding, but it remains to be seen whether any will ultimately deny this added coverage for hundreds of thousands of their citizens. The federal dollars are being offered with no required match for three years. Medicaid is often one of the biggest lines in states' budgets, and that share is growing as healthcare costs continue to rise.
October 10, 2011
Phone Messaging: New Channel to Physicians
It's wildly hit-and-miss -- much like email spam -- but marketers are increasingly using bulk text messaging to penetrate the armor cladding of physician offices. And it's a wide open opportunity; physician office phone numbers are openly published, unlike email addresses. Fax numbers are available too (CarePrecise provider data includes both phone and fax numbers, up to four numbers per record, and we know that it is widely used for marketing to physicians), but "faxpam" doesn't have the same high-tech glamor. Unlike a fax broadcast, text messaging allows marketers to embed a live link to a web landing page, as well as an instantly accessible means for recipients to opt out, making bulk SMS marketing just a little bit more respectable. (Ever tried to get a faxpammer to stop? Ha!)
So what's the difference between bulk SMS cold-calling and plain old spam? Not much, except that it's newer and less fraught with sleaze. And here's something more: It's not free, so spammers can't just set up a computer and start sending 100 million spam messages a day at essentially no cost. Text messaging to phones requires that you have an SMS gateway, or an account with a service provider who has one. These are available to bulk senders, but at a price. Okay, it's not exactly postage, but it's at least a price.
Among the numerous offerings for bulk SMS gateway and software services are Mobomix and TXTwire. Both offer essentially unlimited sending with premium accounts, but both enforce opt-in requirements. That is, you can't just upload a database of phone numbers, such as the 5 million or so in the CarePrecise database, and start texting. Instead, these services require that you are sending only to your own customers or others who have explicitly said, "Yeah, okay, text me spam."
Of course, there's always a workaround. Another company, SMScountry, offers an Excel plug in that lets you send personalized text messages. While they have a similar anti-spam policy, the way the system works would make it difficult to police. As with all bulk SMS systems, it isn't particularly easy for a recipient to contact the carrier to complain. The carrier backbone for SMS is a bit primitive compared with that of email, and there are fewer hooks for filtering messages by the carriers, should they ever want to do what ISPs are doing about email spam. It's pretty much up to the owner of the gateway.
In the war between marketers and physicians, both sides escalate as new weapons or defenses arise. A fax isn't likely to ever see a doctor's spectacles, but that same unreachable physician isn't really that unreachable if you can get his email address or phone number. Naturally, it helps to have her mobile number rather than just the office phone, for obvious reasons. But if you've got a product to sell to docs, any opening is a huge gaping hole, and, even if the text message gets converted to a computer-voiced voice mail message, and, even if only the smallest percentage reach a bona fide phyz, maybe paying $60 a month for a bulk gateway account with few limits sounds good to you. And a good many of those published numbers are cell phones, some portion of them presumably reaching right into a doctor's pocket.
Bulk SMS has its Whitehat side, of course. Services that allow you to enter your customers' account info and send text billing notices, patient appointment reminders, among a host of other applications, are opening up the commercial use of phone messaging. I opted in for a J.C. Penney's coupon texting service, and I use it.
But let's say you've got a nice big customer list, folks who freely gave you their phone numbers (long before the advent of SMSpam, but still...). Can you send em all a coupon, or a new product announcement, or an offer of a free EHR assessment? I want to say no, but we send these same customers more-or-less "unsolicited" email, at least in the sense that they never explicitely said "Send me your coupons," but something more like "Send me product update notices via your monthly newsletter." That phone number was optional, right? Houston, we have achieved opt-in.
Certain advantages of smartphones, such as the ability to blacklist messagers, are a helpful control. The barriers to entry are currently very high for an SMSpammer who wants to set up his own unrestricted gateway, so he'll be using these third party services and, perhaps, have to behave himself. But look for text marketing to grow wildly in the near future.
Check out our page on Marketing to Healthcare Providers.
So what's the difference between bulk SMS cold-calling and plain old spam? Not much, except that it's newer and less fraught with sleaze. And here's something more: It's not free, so spammers can't just set up a computer and start sending 100 million spam messages a day at essentially no cost. Text messaging to phones requires that you have an SMS gateway, or an account with a service provider who has one. These are available to bulk senders, but at a price. Okay, it's not exactly postage, but it's at least a price.
Among the numerous offerings for bulk SMS gateway and software services are Mobomix and TXTwire. Both offer essentially unlimited sending with premium accounts, but both enforce opt-in requirements. That is, you can't just upload a database of phone numbers, such as the 5 million or so in the CarePrecise database, and start texting. Instead, these services require that you are sending only to your own customers or others who have explicitly said, "Yeah, okay, text me spam."
Of course, there's always a workaround. Another company, SMScountry, offers an Excel plug in that lets you send personalized text messages. While they have a similar anti-spam policy, the way the system works would make it difficult to police. As with all bulk SMS systems, it isn't particularly easy for a recipient to contact the carrier to complain. The carrier backbone for SMS is a bit primitive compared with that of email, and there are fewer hooks for filtering messages by the carriers, should they ever want to do what ISPs are doing about email spam. It's pretty much up to the owner of the gateway.
In the war between marketers and physicians, both sides escalate as new weapons or defenses arise. A fax isn't likely to ever see a doctor's spectacles, but that same unreachable physician isn't really that unreachable if you can get his email address or phone number. Naturally, it helps to have her mobile number rather than just the office phone, for obvious reasons. But if you've got a product to sell to docs, any opening is a huge gaping hole, and, even if the text message gets converted to a computer-voiced voice mail message, and, even if only the smallest percentage reach a bona fide phyz, maybe paying $60 a month for a bulk gateway account with few limits sounds good to you. And a good many of those published numbers are cell phones, some portion of them presumably reaching right into a doctor's pocket.
Bulk SMS has its Whitehat side, of course. Services that allow you to enter your customers' account info and send text billing notices, patient appointment reminders, among a host of other applications, are opening up the commercial use of phone messaging. I opted in for a J.C. Penney's coupon texting service, and I use it.
But let's say you've got a nice big customer list, folks who freely gave you their phone numbers (long before the advent of SMSpam, but still...). Can you send em all a coupon, or a new product announcement, or an offer of a free EHR assessment? I want to say no, but we send these same customers more-or-less "unsolicited" email, at least in the sense that they never explicitely said "Send me your coupons," but something more like "Send me product update notices via your monthly newsletter." That phone number was optional, right? Houston, we have achieved opt-in.
Certain advantages of smartphones, such as the ability to blacklist messagers, are a helpful control. The barriers to entry are currently very high for an SMSpammer who wants to set up his own unrestricted gateway, so he'll be using these third party services and, perhaps, have to behave himself. But look for text marketing to grow wildly in the near future.
Check out our page on Marketing to Healthcare Providers.
September 11, 2011
91 Charged With $295 Million Medicare Fraud
Ninety-one doctors, nurses and others were charged in a blockbuster sting operation, with arrests unfolding over three weeks and culminating in 70 arrests last week. In 2007, a strike force was set up between the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services to identify and build federal fraud cases to fight criminal abuse of federal healthcare programs. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that arrests were made in eight US cities involving more than $295 million in stolen funds.
Almost half of those charged were part of a Florida ring that recruited healthcare providers to refer patients to a mental health center, in some cases threatening residents of a halfway house with eviction if they refused the unnecessary care. Another case involved $3.4 million in unnecessary physical therapy by two Brooklyn physicians.
On September 1, officials in Detroit charged 18 physicians, nurses, clinic owners and other medical professionals for submitting $28 million in false claims to Medicare. Just one day earlier, the owner of a Houston, Texas durable medical equipment business was sentenced to 97 months in prison for his role in a Medicare fraud scheme.
In all, the strike force, known as Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), has charged 1,140 defendants who collectively have falsely billed the Medicare program for more than $2.9 billion.
When providers have been convicted of fraud and certain other infractions and delinquencies, their names are placed on the List of Excluded Individuals/Entities (LEIE) database. CarePrecise compiles this data into its comprehensive database of U.S. healthcare providers, identifying excluded providers' NPI numbers, phone and fax numbers.
Read the full story on the HHS website.
Almost half of those charged were part of a Florida ring that recruited healthcare providers to refer patients to a mental health center, in some cases threatening residents of a halfway house with eviction if they refused the unnecessary care. Another case involved $3.4 million in unnecessary physical therapy by two Brooklyn physicians.
On September 1, officials in Detroit charged 18 physicians, nurses, clinic owners and other medical professionals for submitting $28 million in false claims to Medicare. Just one day earlier, the owner of a Houston, Texas durable medical equipment business was sentenced to 97 months in prison for his role in a Medicare fraud scheme.
In all, the strike force, known as Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), has charged 1,140 defendants who collectively have falsely billed the Medicare program for more than $2.9 billion.
When providers have been convicted of fraud and certain other infractions and delinquencies, their names are placed on the List of Excluded Individuals/Entities (LEIE) database. CarePrecise compiles this data into its comprehensive database of U.S. healthcare providers, identifying excluded providers' NPI numbers, phone and fax numbers.
Read the full story on the HHS website.
September 9, 2011
U.S. Doctors Earn Big, Drive Up Costs
According to a new study published in Health Affairs, America's approximately 1.1 million physicians are paid dramatically higher fees than those in all of the other more than 230 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries. Per capita, our physicians are paid $1,599; other countries averaged significantly less than that -- about 81% less -- or about $310. The difference, nearly $1,300, is a major factor in driving up U.S. healthcare costs, and, according to the report, is the the main cause of higher overall spending in America on physicians' services.
The disparity comes into stark focus in the area of specialists' fees. While U.S. primary care docs earned significantly higher than their foreign counterparts -- averaging $186,582 annually -- orthopedic physicians earned $442,450. As an example, the study compared physicians’ fees paid by public and private payers for hip replacements in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, finding that much higher fees were paid to U.S. orthopedic physicians for hip replacements (70 percent more for public payers, 120 percent more for private payers) than public and private payers paid these specialitsts in other countries. The study concludes that "the higher fees, rather than factors such as higher practice costs, volume of services, or tuition expenses, were the main drivers of higher U.S. spending, particularly in orthopedics."
According to August, 2011 CarePrecise data, of the approximately 1.1 million U.S. physicians, about 35,500 practice as orthopedists and orthopedic surgeons, with another 378,000 specialists practicing in the high fee taxonomies. Only about 160,000 U.S. physicians serve in family practice.
The disparity comes into stark focus in the area of specialists' fees. While U.S. primary care docs earned significantly higher than their foreign counterparts -- averaging $186,582 annually -- orthopedic physicians earned $442,450. As an example, the study compared physicians’ fees paid by public and private payers for hip replacements in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, finding that much higher fees were paid to U.S. orthopedic physicians for hip replacements (70 percent more for public payers, 120 percent more for private payers) than public and private payers paid these specialitsts in other countries. The study concludes that "the higher fees, rather than factors such as higher practice costs, volume of services, or tuition expenses, were the main drivers of higher U.S. spending, particularly in orthopedics."
According to August, 2011 CarePrecise data, of the approximately 1.1 million U.S. physicians, about 35,500 practice as orthopedists and orthopedic surgeons, with another 378,000 specialists practicing in the high fee taxonomies. Only about 160,000 U.S. physicians serve in family practice.
July 1, 2011
Medicare Wins in Vegas Fraud Case
Rakesh Nathu, a Las Vegas oncologist, settled his fraud case with the Justice Department yesterday for $5.7 million plus interest. Dr. Nathu was accused of submitting false claims to Medicare, TRICARE and the Federal Employees Health Plan for various radiation oncology services, including intensity modulated radiation therapy, and double billing for services. We hope he did better at the craps table. The government has recovered more than $7.3 billion in False Claim Act cases since 2009.
Among CarePrecise clients are law enforcement agencies working on federal and private payer fraud investigations. As a result of work done for our clients, we developed a means of matching the federal fraud conviction list with providers' NPI records, and associating certain demographic data with practice locations to help visualize patterns. Late in 2010 we began including the fraud data in our CarePrecise Access Complete dataset, and the additional economic data in CarePrecise Gold products. Now included is a flag that indicates provider records whose data strongly suggest a match with the federal LEIE (List of Excluded Individuals/Entities) database. Other features help investigators track providers' licensing, credentials, specialty codes, enrollment in the PECOS database, and numerous other functions.
Read the Justice Department news release.
March 8, 2011
Patients Want Their Providers Online
The second-annual study from Intuit Health, the Health Care Check-Up Survey, found that 73% of Americans surveyed would use secure online tools to access lab results, request appointments, pay medical bills, and communicate with their doctor's office. CarePrecise began building web portals for healthcare providers a few years ago, and has seen a rise in interest from providers, who want to be able to point patients to written information in the controlled environment of their websites. Providers are also looking at adding scheduling applications, and some are participating in PHRs (patient health record portals). Read the Information Week article.
November 3, 2010
Call for CMS to Release Tax Number Data
The NPI Final Rule called for CMS to establish a system that would assign a National Provider Identifier (NPI) number to essentially every healthcare provider in the U.S. (HIPAA "covered entities"): now more than 3 million providers and growing. Great. But it was years before CMS released that data for the industry to use. CarePrecise personnel were at the forefront even back then, calling for CMS to release the data. If necessary, we were ready to fight for it, filing our own request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Federal agencies can't keep such kinds of data from the public. It's the law. CMS eventually looked at FOIA, and at their provider data, and decided that, sure enough, they were going to have to release it. We and our clients were ecstatic; now the industry would be able to produce the complex crosswalks necessary to actually achieve the efficiencies promised by the Final Rule.
Hurray... except CMS decided not to release one of the most useful data points of all. A provider's federal tax number is hardly a private number. Businesses have to give their tax number on every imaginable type of transaction. Employees see the employer's number on their W-2s. CMS's excuse was that sole proprietors and pretty much all individual practitioners would have to give their Social Security Number, or that busy doctors might type in the SSN in the wrong spot. Fair enough, but, as everyone who works with data knows, it's a piece of cake to parse a tax number field to determine if the number is a SSN or a business tax number.In fact, that's just exactly what CMS does in the Other ID fields of the NPPES (National Plan and Provider Enumeration System) database, replacing 000-00-0000 with a string of equals signs.
Instead of just redacting the SSNs, CMS decided it was best just to wipe clean the complete Employer Identification Number (EIN) field -- just in case some uppity docs got... uppity. Many of us have been hoping that CMS would revisit the issue of this gaping hole in the provider data, but it seems that the issue is to be ignored so that it will just go away.
So, here we are, once again, years into it, asking CMS to release non-SSN tax numbers/EINs so that we -- health systems and health plans large and small, clearinghouses, HIT vendors, medical billing and coding vendors -- can make this data do what it was intended to do for healthcare and for the taxpayers.
Hurray... except CMS decided not to release one of the most useful data points of all. A provider's federal tax number is hardly a private number. Businesses have to give their tax number on every imaginable type of transaction. Employees see the employer's number on their W-2s. CMS's excuse was that sole proprietors and pretty much all individual practitioners would have to give their Social Security Number, or that busy doctors might type in the SSN in the wrong spot. Fair enough, but, as everyone who works with data knows, it's a piece of cake to parse a tax number field to determine if the number is a SSN or a business tax number.In fact, that's just exactly what CMS does in the Other ID fields of the NPPES (National Plan and Provider Enumeration System) database, replacing 000-00-0000 with a string of equals signs.
Instead of just redacting the SSNs, CMS decided it was best just to wipe clean the complete Employer Identification Number (EIN) field -- just in case some uppity docs got... uppity. Many of us have been hoping that CMS would revisit the issue of this gaping hole in the provider data, but it seems that the issue is to be ignored so that it will just go away.
So, here we are, once again, years into it, asking CMS to release non-SSN tax numbers/EINs so that we -- health systems and health plans large and small, clearinghouses, HIT vendors, medical billing and coding vendors -- can make this data do what it was intended to do for healthcare and for the taxpayers.
October 8, 2010
New Web-based Tool Improves Chronic Care
Say you're a physician caring for diabetes and heart disease patients. Would you like to have a tireless chronic care expert elf poring over your patients' records every night, comparing their care with evidence-based practices, looking for things you might not notice? Kaiser Permanente's lead author of an American Journal of Managed Care study, Adrianne Feldstein, MD, thinks maybe you should. "Patients in the U.S. receive only about half of the preventive and follow-up care now recommended by national guidelines," says Dr. Feldstein. A new web-based Panel Support Tool (PST) extracts information from the electronic medical record and compares it to care recommended by national guidelines. Read the article in Healthcare IT News.
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