Call us toll-free: 800-878-7828 — Monday - Friday — 8AM - 5PM EST
By Jordan Rau for Kaiser Health News Once again, the majority of the nation’s hospitals are being penalized by Medicare for having patients frequently return within a month of discharge — this time losing a combined $420 million, government records show. In the fourth year of federal readmission penalties, 2,592 hospitals will receive lower payments…
Tom Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Healthcare IT News We saw with the Sony hack that when attackers find health data they’re likely to steal it The Pentagon confirmed late Thursday that Russian hackers penetrated the Defense Department’s IT networks and gained access to Joint Chiefs of Staff email servers. As has become the norm for government and…
By Leslie Kriegstein, Interim Vice President of Public Policy, CHIME for Healthcare Informatics Congressional Affairs Flex-IT Bill Makes Series of Meaningful Use Program Changes Key Takeaway: Congresswoman Renee Ellmers (R-NC-02) introduced legislation last week that makes a series of substantial improvements to the Meaningful Use Program, including a delay in the release Stage 3 rules.…
By Amy Ellis Nutt and Amy Brittain for The Washington Post The Pentagon is poised within days to award one of the most coveted health information-technology contracts in history — the first phase of a deal that could ultimately be worth more than $10.5 billon over the 18-year life of the contract. This is the…
By Joseph Goedert for HealthData Management Federal lawmakers are noticing some dark clouds surrounding the electronic health records meaningful use program to prod providers to adopt EHRs. With rising recent struggles in the program, lawmakers may be poised to intervene to push back the program’s third stage. Problems with the current stage are all too…
By Tulsi Patil for KTUU.com ANCHORAGE – An Anchorage woman was sentenced to two years in federal prison Monday for violations to medical privacy laws, U.S. Attorney Karen Loeffler’s office announced in a press release. According to prosecutors, 33-year-old Stacy Laulu was a financial counselor at Providence Hospital in March, 2013 when she was contacted…
By Government Health IT Staff for Government Health IT The use of electronic clinical quality measures (eCQM) for reporting data will be “invaluable” for monitoring numerous clinical conditions, according to research published in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidly and Mortality Weekly Report. The report used eCQM data that was submitted by 63,000…
Article by Chris Dimick, Editor-in-chief at the Journal of AHIMA. This article was originally published on the Journal of AHIMA website on May 4, 2015 and is republished here with permission. A bill has been introduced into the US House of Representatives that would stop the implementation of ICD-10-CM The bill, H.R. 2126, would “prohibit…
By Elisabeth Rosenthal for The New York Times I CONFESS I filed this column several weeks late in large part because I had hoped first to figure out a medical bill whose serial iterations have been arriving monthly like clockwork for half a year. As medical bills go, it’s not very big: $225, from a…
By Dr. Jonathan Elion, MD, FACC for HealthTECH Zone The Photographic Painting The value of a new technology is often not understood for many years after its invention. The first film cameras (remember those?) were initially used to capture landscapes, still life studies and portraits. In that regard, they were acting as a “photographic painting”,…