hospitals – HEALTHCARE BEAT

Highlights From The 2016 State of The Medicine Address

GomerBlog highlights the major points from tonight’s State of The Medicine Address given by the President of Hospital Administrators, Mr. Cutter Salary.

Hospitals now have the highest patient satisfaction in the history of healthcare and probably correlates to increased quality of care according to patients and lawmakers

WiFi, fast food restaurants, and pianos are distributed throughout hospital lobbies replacing exam rooms and useless medical equipment

Doctors now spend 50% of their time coding which is a vast improvement over last year and has led to spectacular reimbursement rates to enable hiring of more administrators. Remember Caring IS Coding!

Unnecessary Nurse bonuses were removed in a major cost saving move this year. To save even more money, cuts will start with the nursing staff and end with the nursing staff

More paperwork was passed by the Joint Commission providing critical safety measures requiring timeouts before codes to prevent wrong sided CPR

Drinks were finally stripped from the Nursing Station. This year we must continue with stripping any fun or laughter from the Station. We don’t want our patients thinking we are making fun of them

Breaks are vanishing from the workplace and we need to continue that for our medical providers. Foley catheters were distributed to staff to help our providers perform flawless and uninterrupted care

Surgeons are required to perform 3 more surgeries a day and leave when it is dark outside. Skin cancer rates are drastically down in our employees now thanks to this move.

Patient to Nurse ratios are at an all-time high providing a challenging and dynamic work environment to our nursing staff, which we know they enjoy

Physicians are burning out quicker than ever and we are replacing them with cost cutting google university graduated patients

The new Secretary of The Medicine, Dr. Oz, continues to utilize his charismatic charm to educate the public before they come to the hospital

And finally, our budget has been passed and includes hiring another 1.2 million hospital administrators to oversee and provide outstanding medical care to our hospitals!

“God Bless The Medicine and God Bless my obnoxiously large pension!”
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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

Meaningful Use 2 – pushed back one year

By Joseph Conn

Posted: December 6, 2013 – 3:30 pm ET

“The CMS is giving providers another year to show they’ve met the Stage 2 criteria of the federal government’s incentive program to encourage the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records. That means the start of the next phase will be pushed back a year.”

Stage 2 will be extended through 2016 and Stage 3 won’t begin until at least fiscal 2017 for hospitals and calendar year 2017 for physicians and other eligible professionals who have by then completed at least two years at Stage 2.The latest extension parallels what the feds did with Stage 1, which was originally set to last two years but was lengthened by a year when it appeared the industry would be overstretched to build and get acclimated to systems capable of meeting the federal payment program’s more stringent Stage 2 criteria.”

“The goal of this change is twofold,” according to a CMS statement from Robert Tagalicod, director of the Office for E-Health Standards and Services at the CMS, and Dr. Jacob Reider, acting head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS. First, the statement said, its aim is “to allow CMS and ONC to focus efforts on the successful implementation of the enhanced patient engagement, interoperability and health information exchange requirements in Stage 2.” Second, they said, it’s “to utilize data from Stage 2 participation to information policy decisions for Stage 3.” READ MORE

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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.

Fraud & Abuse with EHR … hmmmm

Keeping up with all of the information regarding EHR implementation is nearly a full time job. Every day, hospitals acquire more smaller practices because it is becoming impossible to keep up with the regulations and being able to afford to practice. I wondered about those able to find loop holes and ways to get by with minimal effort and capture incentives. I find this another interesting piece of the puzzle …

If this doesn’t sum it all up, I am not sure what does!

“EHRs are also driving the industry toward charts that look remarkably similar because they’re based on templates created by the technology vendors — that includes often using the same words. And that threatens to make doctors appear to be committing fraud by the practice of record cloning, or cutting and pasting from one record to another, when they are not, in fact, acting fraudulently. Alongside the federal mandate to implement an EHR under threat of a monetary fine, that creates what Stack called “an appalling Catch-22 for physicians.

Put another way: The government mandates that doctors use an EHR, the EHR vendors’ templates can sometimes create an appearance of fraud and that, in turn, opens the door for payers to decline reimbursement or, even worse, the government to prosecute doctors for the crime.

As dire as that sounds, it’s an exception that belies the unproven perception that EHRs perpetuate fraud. “Upcoding does not necessarily equate to fraud and abuse,” said Sue Bowman, AHIMA’s senior director of coding and compliance at the same event. “This is an area where more study is needed. We really need to know the causes. Further research is needed on the fraud risk of using EHRs.”

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“Transcription versus EMR/EHR” – The Perfect Solution

By Andy Braverman, President of Apptec Corporation… a developer of next generation speech processing products.

“The way to do it right, is for the doctor to dictate just as they have for decades.
Dictation is the most efficient use of the doctor’s time. The EMR/EHR should only be in front of the
doctor to review a patient’s records… not to input data into it. For data input into the EMR/EHR, that
should be a “back office” task performed by the transcriptionist.” READ MORE