Tag: electronic medical record

EHR Alerts … and more!

Pew: Patient safety demands more robust testing of EHR usability

Healthcare IT News
Pew Charitable Trusts says not enough attention is being paid to electronic health record usability from a safety point of view. And given that federal certification requirements don’t address two key safety factors, it’s offering EHR developers and provider organizations a toolset to help boost patient protections.  READ MORE

Few execs believe healthcare IT security tech will be disruptive

HealthITSecurity
Only 7 percent of executives surveyed by Reaction Data believe that healthcare IT security technology will have a significant disruptive impact on healthcare. Twenty-nine percent said that telemedicine will be the biggest disruptor, 20 percent said AI, 15 percent said interoperability, 13 percent said data analytics, 11 percent said mobile data, 3 percent said cloud, and surprisingly only 2 percent said blockchain would be the biggest disruptor.  READ MORE

Hackers favor using vulnerable web apps to beat security perimeters

Health Data Management
For many organizations, vulnerable web applications may be their weakest link when it comes to an effective data security strategy. About three-quarters (73 percent) of successful perimeter breaches in 2017 were achieved using vulnerable Web applications, according to Kaspersky Lab’s analysis of penetration tests it conducted on corporate networks that year.  READ MORE

HIMSS: Stark Law hinders care coordination, health data exchange

EHR Intelligence
The Physician Self-Referral Law, commonly known as the Stark Law, places unnecessary administrative burdens on providers while hindering care coordination and health data exchange, according to a letter from HIMSS to CMS Administrator Seema Verma. In response to the federal agency’s June request for information (RFI), HIMSS advised CMS to change Stark Law regulations to ensure they do not prohibit or interfere with health data exchange and care coordination.In its letter, HIMSS emphasized that alternative payment models (APMs) require a flexible regulatory framework to succeed.  READ MORE

How blockchain could solve 4 major problems in healthcare

Health Data Management
The healthcare IT industry faces a host of challenges today, including silos within hospitals that restrict information sharing, integrating artificial intelligence into clinical practice, to solving the opioid crisis. While distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain won’t mitigate all of them, this technology can resolve a number of significant pain points associated with routine business processes.  READ MORE

Medical Document Services of Kansas, LLC (MDS) is a Wichita, Kansas healthcare document service specializing in Medical Billing, Medical Transcription, Scribe Services, and AzaleaHealth EHR.   We provide efficient, accurate, affordable quality services for hospitals, clinics, and facilities of all sizes.   Call 866-777-7264 today, or visit our website for more information.  We have education programs in Medical Scribe Specialists. #MedicalTranscription #AzaleaHealthEHR #RevenueCycleManagement #MDSofKansas #MedicalBillingService #MedicalScribes

Transcription Market Share Analysis

Lower Volumes, But More Stable Outlook

JOHNSON CITY, TN — Of the estimated 2.1 billion patient encounters documented in the United States in 2015, approximately 32%, or over 670 million documents, were generated by dictation and transcription, according to a new market analysis from WebChartMD.

The analysis (click here to access) breaks out the clinical documentation market into the three main documentation methods most often used by healthcare providers: 1) Provider Entry, in which the healthcare provider enters data him/herself into the EHR; 2) dictation and transcription; and 3) Scribe Entry, in which Medical Scribes enter data into the EHR.  Front-end speech recognition usage was not included in the study.

Provider Entry is the leading clinical documentation method, with an estimated 61% market share, followed by dictation and transcription, with an estimated 32%. Scribe Entry trails with an estimated 7% market share.

Dictation and transcription, the second most-used modality, had its heaviest concentration of usage in ambulatory specialty care and hospital-based documentation.  The medical transcription industry had estimated 2015 sales of $2.2 billion, or 20.6 billion annual lines. About 30% of all US-based physicians – or just over 300,000 – continue to use dictation and transcription for some percentage of their clinical documentation, according to a recent WebChartMD estimate.

A notable change in the break-out of market share has been the rise of the Scribe Entry segment, which has grown from a few thousand to over 20,000 Scribes nationwide in just the last few years. Scribes currently process an estimated 143 million patient encounters annually, or about 7% of the entire clinical documentation market.

One take-away from the analysis? “The government has spent billions of dollars since the 2009 HITECH Act to incent physicians to adopt EHR-based clinical documentation tools.  Despite that, there remains a sizable minority of healthcare providers who continue to use dictation and transcription,” said Christensen. “While transcription will never return to its former levels of usage, I believe there are a number of specific reasons why it will persist as a clinical documentation modality.”

About WebChartMD

WebChartMD, a software development company specializing in clinical documentation workflow applications, partners with over 100 MTSOs nationwide, which in turn serve over 8,000 physicians via the WebChartMD platform. 

Medical Document Services of Kansas, LLC (MDS) is a Wichita, Kansas healthcare document service specializing in Medical Billing and RCM, Medical Transcription, Pre-Certs with AzaleaHealth EHR.   We provide efficient, accurate, affordable quality services for hospitals, clinics, and facilities of all sizes. Call 866-777-7264 today, or visit our website for more information.  We have education programs in Medical Scribe Specialists. #medicaltranscription #azaleahealthEHR #revenuecyclemanagement #MDSofKansas #medicalbillingservice

Curious about 2014 predictions?

With so many questions and this being the year of regulations and mandates, this is really worth reading and then filing away to review later.  We are particularly watching the “surge in outsourcing”.  Enjoy!  PS – I  know I am going to start following Mary Pat Whaley, CPC!

 

Medical Document Services of Kansas, LLC (MDS) is a Wichita, Kansas healthcare document service specializing in Medical Transcription, Revenue Cycle Management, AzaleaHealth EHR, and REAL-TIME solutions.   We provide efficient, accurate, affordable quality services for hospitals, clinics, and facilities of all sizes. Call 866-777-7264 today, or visit our website for more information.

2013 Reflections

MDS reflects on the many blessings of 2013.  We have great appreciation for our customers, new and old, our friends, our business alliances and partners, and most of all … our incredible MDS team!  We are confident in what 2014 brings and wish good health, happiness and true peace for all!

AHDI reflects on most read healthcare articles for 2013.  Take a look …

UPMC transcriptionists protest after outsourcing
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
From Nov. 6: Cindy Cromie was a medical transcriptionist working for UPMC Hamot in Erie, Pa., when she, like the rest of the 130 people who provided medical transcriptions for the hospital system, got a call this spring to come to a meeting in Pittsburgh. They gathered in the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC, where they were told that their work was being outsourced to Nuance Communications of Burlington, Mass.

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Job changes coming for transcriptionists
Healthcare IT News
From July 17: Nearly 90 percent of medical transcriptionists say that transitioning to documentation roles with electronic health records means that gaps in skills need to be identified and new career paths charted, according to new a study. New speech and language processing technologies have set the stage for a fundamental transformation in the way transcriptionists work, according to the survey – conducted by the American Health Information Management Association and the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity — which found that 87 percent of respondents are preparing for new ways of doing things.

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AMA: EHRs create ‘appalling Catch-22’
HealthcareIT News
From May 8: As the healthcare industry moves to EHRs, the medical record has essentially been reduced to a tool for billing, compliance and litigation that also has a sustained negative impact on doctors’ productivity, according to Steven J. Stack, M.D., chair of the American Medical Association’s board of trustees. “Documenting a full clinical encounter in an EHR is pure torment,” Stack said during the CMS Listening Session: Billing and Coding with Electronic Health Records.

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Speech recognition software: Does it help or hinder care workflow?

FierceHealthIT
From Nov. 20: Does front-end speech recognition make for a smooth-running operation, or does it simply complicate documentation and patient care? Doctors and researchers debate this question in the November 2013 issue of health information management magazine For the Record. Gary David, Ph.D., an associate professor of sociology at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., notes in the article that front-end speech recognition does not always save labor, but it does change workflow.

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Scribes can be beneficial in medical practices
HealthDay News via Doctors Lounge
From Oct. 23: Medical scribes can accurately document physician or independent practitioner dictation and activities, allowing providers to spend more time with patients, according to an article published in Medical Economics. Maxine Lewis, president of Medical Coding & Reimbursement in Cincinnati, discusses the role of scribes in medical practices.

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EHR copy and paste? Better think twice
Healthcare IT News
From Oct. 9: Who would have thought that something so simple as copy and paste could have such serious consequences? Speaking at the MGMA annual conference in San Diego, Diana Warner, director at AHIMA, confirmed the seriousness of inappropriately using copy and paste functions in electronic health records. And the government agrees — it’s no laughing matter.

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Digital health records’ risks emerge as deaths blamed on systems
Bloomberg
From June 26: Electronic health records are supposed to improve medical care by providing physicians quick and easy access to a patient’s history, prescriptions, lab results and other vital data. While the new computerized systems have decreased some kinds of errors, such as those caused by doctors’ illegible prescriptions, the shift away from paper has also created new problems, with sometimes dire consequences.

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Medical scribes boost EHR productivity, streamline workflow
EHR Intelligence
From Sept 25: While EHRs are sold to physicians as a way to increase quality while making documentation more efficient, few providers have seen as much return on that promise as they could like. EHRs can be time consuming to use on a daily basis, and patient interaction can suffer when being forced to peer at a computer screen during consult after consult. The solution, according to one cardiology practice, is to let a professional typist do the typing, and allow the physician to use his skills where they do the most good.

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Updated HIPAA rules posing challenges for healthcare providers
The Wall Street Journal via iHealthBeat
From May 8: Health care providers say they likely will face challenges complying with new rules that expand and update HIPAA provisions. One of the biggest challenges under the new HIPAA rules is a provision allowing patients to request that insurers not be informed of treatments that patients paid for themselves.

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Speech recognition: A work in progress
For The Record
From May 1: While controversy remains within the healthcare community regarding the best approach to using speech recognition technology, there are some points that most industry professionals agree on. Few would dispute that the vendor community has made tremendous strides to advance applications to better meet the needs of the healthcare industry, and innovation continues as developers look for ways to make the technology more intelligent and accurate.

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Medical Document Services of Kansas, LLC (MDS) is a Wichita, Kansas healthcare document service specializing in Medical Transcription, Revenue Cycle Management, AzaleaHealth EHR, and REAL-TIME solutions.   We provide efficient, accurate, affordable quality services for hospitals, clinics, and facilities of all sizes. Call 866-777-7264 today, or visit our website for more information.

 

Are Medical Scribes Worth the Investment?

“Are scribes really worth it? It’s a question that has likely come up for many a hospital administrator. Now a study gauging the cost/benefit ratio of medical scribes has been completed. The landmark project, which actually was titled “Are Scribes Worth It?,” concluded that scribe programs can greatly assist higher acuity emergency departments that are struggling with long patient stays, a high percent of patients leaving without treatment and challenging electronic medical record systems.   Some medical scribe programs, according to the study, actually more than pay for themselves.

The study was produced by Tanveer Gaibi, MD, medical director for Northwest Hospital in Randallstown, Md., Michael Hochberg, MD, medical director for Saint Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., Daria Starosta, MD, EmCare director of practice improvement, and Mark Switaj, MBA, an EmCare client administrator.

“We wanted to determine whether medical scribes are truly worth the investment,” says Dr. Starosta. “We focused on determining improvements in overall productivity and quality in the emergency departments and the financial return on investment of medical scribes.”  read more ….

Continue reading “Are Medical Scribes Worth the Investment?”