The final rule adopting ICD-10 as a standard was published in January 2009 and set a compliance date of October 1, 2013 – a delay of two years from the compliance date initially specified in the 2008 proposed rule.  HHS will announce a new compliance date moving forward.

“ICD-10 codes are important to many positive improvements in our health care system,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.  “We have heard from many in the provider community who have concerns about the administrative burdens they face in the years ahead.  We are committing to work with the provider community to reexamine the pace at which HHS and the nation implement these important improvements to our health care system.”

ICD-10 codes provide more robust and specific data that will help improve patient care and enable the exchange of our health care data with that of the rest of the world that has long been using ICD-10.  Entities covered under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) will be required to use the ICD-10 diagnostic and procedure codes.

For more details, visit http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2012pres/02/20120216a.html

This healthcare initiative’s purpose is to provide not only needed medical services to the community, but also provide employment for our residents. To begin this process, community residents will be trained in electronic health records (EHR) technologies creating employment opportunities in the field of internet healthcare which will address the disparities in Southeast Queens.

Unemployed community residents will be trained in the computer facility located within Rochdale Village and cover various disciplines in both internet technology and the use of EHR technologies with specific applications for clinics, physicians and residents which enables them to gain meaningful employment in this community.

Trained residents will be working with participating hospitals, medical schools, and academic institutions in preparation for an integrated healthcare program establishing the platform in building an accountable care organization (ACO) to better serve the community’s healthcare needs.

Dr. Robert Evans, CEO/President of CWCOA stated, we have secured the support from renowned healthcare institutions, specialty physician group practices and State supported services for mental illness and HIV/AIDS to provide easily accessible medical services for our community which includes walk-in clinics, cardiovascular and diabetes services. All of these services will undoubtedly provide various employment opportunities for residents interested in the field of medical services.

Dr. Evans also stated that he and Mr. Divan Da’ve / CEO of OmniMD have worked together on several successful projects including the Healthy Heart Project which was a cardiovascular screening held free of charge in Rochdale, November 2010, and attended by hundreds of residents,  legislators and stakeholders within the community.

CWCOA healthcare initiative will empower the community to fight disparities in healthcare which is supported by both State Senator Shirley Huntley’s office and members of the Rochdale Board of Directors; these members include Joe Evans, Gene Castro and Jeanne Hall

MISSION OBJECTIVES WITH HEALTHCARE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

CWCOA mission in developing a comprehensive approach and using healthcare information technologies is to identify the specific disparities, and tailor culturally competent clinical quality improvement initiatives that:

• Automate and standardize the collection of race/ethnicity and all relevant data;
• Enables us to prioritize the use of the data for identifying disparities and tailoring     improvement efforts for the treatment and educational programs required to address chronic illnesses and diseases;
• Focus our healthcare information technology efforts to address fragmented care  delivery for racial/ethnic minorities and provide in-home telemedicine services and access to personal healthcare records through secured access contained within OmniMD electronic health records (EHR) technology system; and
• Development of standard practice patterns of care integrated with hospitals and medical services in our community that will provide this healthcare program with increased data analytic capacity to better coordinate care and improve the timely deliverance of care which is fully interoperable with any healthcare information system our local hospitals have adopted.

About OmniMD™:

OmniMD™, Version 11.0 is an ONC-ATCB 2011-2012 certified EHR. OmniMD™, Version 11.0 is a CCHIT Certified® 2011 Ambulatory EHR with Five Star Usability Rating. OmniMD™ suite of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Practice Management System (PMS) product and services offer unparalleled reliability, ease-of-use, efficiency, and customizability. The comprehensive feature set is customer-driven, innovative and continuously updated to keep pace with rapid changes in healthcare industry. The specialty-specific EHR covers over 30 medical specialties, and is fully customizable to suit individual needs and workflow settings. From EHR to practice management to electronic claims, OmniMD™ empowers healthcare organizations to effectively address their financial, administrative, clinical, and regulatory needs. OmniMD™ is division of Integrated Systems Management Inc.

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According to the report - US Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Market, 2010-2015 (Market Share, Winning Strategies and Adoption Trends), the EMR market is estimated to grow from $2,177 million in 2009 to $6,054 million in 2015.

The market is booming as most health facilities in the US are moving towards adopting some form of Electronic Health Record system to rein in operational costs and improve practice efficiency. Adoption of a robust EMR system is also a core requirement under the EHR incentive program, which has also increased the demand for these systems.

EMR vendors are now seeking physician inputs to improve the usability of EMR systems even more and sustain the demand. Their focus is to ensure that EMR systems make patient information available in the format and manner desired by the providers.

Electronic Medical Records not only help practices store patient records electronically but are becoming an indispensable tool in delivering modern EHR and practice management solutions. This is why even the success of the EHR incentive program hinges on the effective implementation of EMR systems in hospitals and other care facilities.

Modern EMR systems convert patients’ paper records into electronic format, and make them accessible to providers anytime and anywhere, making the process of health care delivery faster, efficient and effective. Also, as EMRs capture detailed demographic and clinical patient data, they serve as an important information resource for researchers and government health agencies. This data can be used for studies conducted to understand which sections of the population are more vulnerable to certain diseases and devise disease prevention strategies.

In the study, researchers were able to cull patient information in electronic medical records from routine doctors’ visits at five national sites that all used different brands of medical record software. The information allowed researchers to accurately identify patients with five kinds of diseases or health conditions – type 2 diabetes, dementia, peripheral arterial disease, cataracts and cardiac conduction.

“The hard part of doing genetic studies has been identifying enough people to get meaningful results,” said lead investigator Abel Kho, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “Now we’ve shown you can do it using data that’s already been collected in electronic medical records and can rapidly generate large groups of patients.”

The paper is published in Science Translational Medicine.

To identify the diseases, Kho and colleagues searched the records using a series of criteria such as medications, diagnoses and laboratory tests. They then tested their results against the gold standard – review by physicians. The physicians confirmed the results, Kho said. The electronic health records allowed researchers to identify patients’ diseases with 73 to 98 percent accuracy.

The researchers also were able to reproduce previous genetic findings from prospective studies using the electronic medical records. The five institutions that participated in the study collected genetic samples for research. Patients agreed to the use of their records for studies.

Sequencing individuals’ genomes is becoming faster and cheaper. It soon may be possible to include patients’ genomes in their medical records, Kho noted. This would create a bountiful resource for genetic research.

“With permission from patients, you could search electronic health records at not just five sites but 25 or 100 different sites and identify 10,000 or 100,000 patients with diabetes, for example,” Kho said.

The larger the group of patients for genetic studies, the better the ability to detect rarer affects of the genes and the more detailed genetic sequences that cause a person to develop a disease.

The study also showed across-the-board weaknesses in institutions’ electronic medical records. The institutions didn’t do a good job of capturing race and ethnicity, smoking status and family history, all which are important areas of study, Kho said. “It shows we need to focus our efforts to use electronic medical records more meaningfully,” he added.

Source   :   http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/study-emrs-speed-genetic-health-studies

EMR is the computerized form of medical records. It is a unique way in which all the patient data can be stored, read, studied, and manipulated at the ease of physician. Due to its following advantages, it has become very popular :

• EMR enables the easy mobility of medical records. By EMR, medical records can be accessed by the authorized person from almost anywhere.
• EMR is the best way to cut on the costs incurred on transportation and postage of data, salaries of healthcare professionals, stationery charges, and technological costs. By inculcating EMR in your system, you save the money and time spent on creation, gathering, and management of medical records. In order to avail a errorless and secure product, you have to pay a very reasonable fee.
• EMR assures you of a better quality product with huge reduction in the chances of making errors. It is handled by professionals who are proficient and adequately trained for the job.

Healthcare professionals can hugely benefit from outsourcing EMR services. Besides being a quicker and cost-effective procedure, it is a sure shot solution to all the worries related to electronic medical records.

Source    :     http://www.lonad.com/2011/04/01/electronic-medical-records-%E2%80%93-freedom-from-record-keeping-hassles/

In order to draw maximum benefits from the EMR, it is important to choose the provider based on the following criteria:

• While choosing an EMR provider, you should take into account the experience of the provider in the healthcare industry. You should stick to the experienced providers.

• You should be knowledgeable as to how much support a provider offers. Assessing their range of support options ensures you get the needful help for seamless operations. Take your time to select the one that offers the best support and product.

• You should make sure that your provider facilitates easy and quick access to all the patients’ information to you.

• To ensure privacy of your database, adhering to the one with HIPPA compliance is a must.

• It is advisable to visit and explore options of various EMR vendors. You can run an online search, visit the websites, and even take advice from EMR consulting service to support your decision.

Transitioning to a new technology system can be difficult but by selecting the right electronic medical records provider and wise planning, you will be able to increase the efficiency and speed at the office and that too at a very affordable price.

Source    :     http://www.lonad.com/2011/03/22/electronic-medical-records-%E2%80%93-keeping-pace-with-new-age-healthcare/

The study, conducted by researchers from the Regenstrief Institute and the schools of medicine at Indiana University and Moi University in Kenya, is one of the first ever to examine and demonstrate the impact of EMRs on quality of medical care in a developing country. The comparative study used clinical summaries with computer‑generated reminders.

In the study appearing in the March Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Martin Chieng Were, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine and a Regenstrief Institute investigator, and colleagues found that computer-generated reminders used in clinics in Eldoret, Kenya yielded nearly a 50 percent increase in the appropriate ordering of the CD4 blood tests.

“We need to improve quality of care in the developing world at a time when funding for HIV and other diseases is stagnating or decreasing–which means we will have to do it with fewer personnel as the number of patients increases,” Were said.

Also, this work is particularly significant, the researchers said, because many medical errors occur in settings where too few skilled health‑care providers deal with a large patient population with critical illnesses.

Source   :    http://www.fierceemr.com/story/emrs-found-improve-care-quality-countries-limited-resources/2011-03-22

The survey reviews office visits made by ambulatory patients to non-Federal office-based physicians (excluding those in the specialties of anesthesiology, radiology, and pathology) who are engaged in direct patient care.

This survey size could expand by another 1,000 physicians–and 30,000 visit records–if Congress approves a fiscal 2011 budget increases for the survey requested by President Obama. NCHS also could increase the sample by another 500 physicians funded through the Affordable Care Act.

“These increases will greatly improve the ability to track providers’ practice patterns, including their adoption and meaningful use of health information technology,” a CDC notice published Feb. 11 in the Federal Register says.

A supplemental mail survey on the adoption and use of EMRs in physician offices was added to the CDC survey in 2008, and it will continue, according to Health Data Management. However, the scope of the survey is expanding in 2011: It will collect information and characteristics of physician practices and how  EMRs are used in those practices, the notice says.

In addition, the mail survey will ask about physician workflow before and after EMR implementation. The EMR workflow mail survey, sponsored by Office of the National Coordinator, will evaluate the progress of “meeting the President’s goal for most Americans to have access to an interoperable electronic health record by 2014,” according to the notice.

Source    :    http://www.fierceemr.com/story/cdc-survey-will-review-physician-adoption-emrs/2011-02-17

The value of the market for EMRs was about $15.7 billion in 2010, according to the New York-based healthcare market research company in its latest report, “EMR 2011: The Market for Electronic Medical Record Systems.”

The EMR growth rate in 2010 was 13.6 percent–just above the rate in 2009 (10 percent). These rates were less, though, than predicted by Kalorama researchers (it had predicted about a 15 percent growth for both years). However, the rates may be improving as physician adoption improves and more incentive checks for EMR adoption under meaningful use guidelines are sent out.

Kalorama is predicting that adoption and upgrading activities will be “brisk” in coming years. As new systems are sold, companies will earn revenues from existing clients in servicing and consulting–resulting in a market growth rate of 18 to 20 percent for the next two years.

“We think that while progress was made in physician adoption and in vendor sales, there is still a lot more potential,” said Bruce Carlson, publisher of Kalorama Information, in a statement. “There are still a considerable number of physicians who need to be fully functional and hospitals that have to improve their stage ranking.”

Source     :      http://www.fierceemr.com/story/emr-market-expected-increase-growth/2011-03-03

The study was published in the February edition of the journal HSR: Health Services Research.

Researchers say this report is different because most previous studies of EMRs have focused on the attitudes of clinicians or health organizations. Surprisingly few have focused on the attitudes of consumers toward health IT and, of those, none were based on a sample that fully represents the American people.

Key findings of the study are:

• Fifty-nine percent believe EMRs could reduce health costs
• Seventy-two percent support sharing of health care information among providers
• Eighty percent favored use of e-prescribing
• Seventy-nine percent thought that personal health records would help patients to be better informed about their health.
• Despite the fact that 48 percent of Americans are concerned about the privacy of medical records, fully 64 percent said that the benefits of EMRs outweigh privacy concerns
• The study also found that Americans aren’t without their reservations. Forty-four percent said they are not willing to pay to increase the use of health IT, and 57 percent said that use of health IT would make no difference in their choice of a physician.

Individuals with lower income and those who have less familiarity with electronic technology have less favorable attitudes towards health IT, the study found. Researchers say this implies that some of the populations that are most likely to benefit from health IT may be least open-minded about it.

“Our core finding is that a large majority of Americans support use of health IT to improve healthcare and safety, and reduce costs, which suggests that government and industry efforts to increase the effectiveness and use of health IT are generally consistent with the public’s wishes,” said Dan Gaylin, NORC’s executive vice president for Research, and the lead author of the study. “But there is still room for efforts to demonstrate the advantages of health IT among some important demographic groups.”

Source   :    http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/study-most-americans-support-emrs