- Legal vertical workload increases. According to Cowen Group, litigation support departments at law firms are experiencing double digit growth in workload during 2010. Data includes:
o work hours are up
o increases in eDiscovery workloads
o increase in litigation support
o many plan to add staff
o increases in budget for technology purchases
- IBM announced it will offer healthcare IT in the cloud working with Aetna Insurance through its ActiveHealth unit. It will compete with similar offerings from Practice Fusion, AthenaHealth and eClinicalWorks.
- Prompted by the CBS report in April on copier data security, a newspaper in Europe, called News of the World, did its own investigation of copier hard drives. The newspaper purchased a number of trade-in copiers and found:
o NATO briefing notes
o Details of a bank account belonging to BAE systems (a large defense contractor)
o The information was found on the hard drive of a Canon imageRUNNER
- Fujitsu launched a free service that lets individuals use their mobile phones to keep personal health records. The cell phones have sensors to record weight, body fat and blood pressure.
- Fujitsu and the University of Tokyo announced that they have jointly built a supercomputer system that can development drugs to treat cancer and metastasis.
- The Forrester Group reported that its survey of healthcare IT professionals revealed that 75% had their systems go down over the last year. 61% stated it took more than 1 hour to recover from the crash.
- Epson announced a new print driver, called ESC/P-R, that will allow some of its color inkjet printers to print from Royal Phillips ultrasound equipment in the healthcare industry
- Recent data on healthcare reveals:
o currently there are roughly 750,000 healthcare establishments in the U.S.
6,013 hospitals
918,000 physicians
• 67% affiliated with hospital
• 60% have no HER
• Less than 25% of doctors prescribe drugs electronically
o In addition to medical records and forms, the most common paper documents per department are:
Customer Records include contracts, forms, authorizations, contact reports and email
Human Resources include resumes, contracts, expense reports, vacation requests and reviews
Legal includes contracts, e-discovery and auditing
Purchasing includes purchase orders, receiving slips, invoices and confirmations
Product management includes designs, drawings, data sheets and contacts
o The most common reasons why they will invest in technology:
81.5% want to increase productivity
67.7% want to lower costs
60% want to address security requirements
o Only 40% of those surveyed had some type of document management system
- Recent AMA survey shows that it is not uncommon for medical practices to report a gross collection rate of only 60% or less. This means that for every $1.00 of medical services billed, the physician may only receive 60 cents. Other findings:
o gross charges denied by payers has grown to 14-18%
o denied, rejected, resubmitted and underpaid claims can costs as much as $100,000 per month
o practice can lose as much as $75,000 per year in denied claims that are never resubmitted
o many practices do not resubmit up to 50% of their claims
o underpayment of claims is as much as 35% lower than contracted amount
- In a recent healthcare industry trade magazine, in section titled “The Healthcare IT Guy”, recent reminders were given for doctors to qualify for federal funds for implementation of an electronic health records (EHR) system: (of which MFPs, scanners, document management and middleware can play a role)
o If starting implementation in 2012, will be eligible for full payments from Medicare ($44K over 5 years)
o Can start as late as 201 to get full payments from Medicaid ($63K+ over 6 years)
o For hospitals, payments include a base amount of $2 million, plus $200 per patient, starting with the hospital’s 1,150th patient discharged and ending with No. 23,000, beginning in 2011 fiscal year.
Both doctors and hospitals that cannot “demonstrate meaningful use of EHR” by beginning of the 2015 fiscal year will be penalized
- As the healthcare industry “digitizes”, one of the concerns is the amount of data storage that will be required. In a recent article in “Healthcare Technology”, the data collected by medical imaging (radiology) equipment was detailed:
o “Prior to the mid-90s, most of the scanning was only two slices. Now 3D visualization is a must-have application and a primary diagnostic tool. This has had a significant impact on the medical imaging industry. For example, if you took a head and neck scan in 1994, it was about 21 slices. Today, a single head and neck scan is 240 slices.”
o Formats/acronyms used in radiology are; PACS (picture archiving and communication system) and DICOM (digital imaging and communications in medicine)
- Four different insurance companies announced that they will offer financial incentives to physicians and hospitals for meeting federal EHR meaningful use rules:
o Aetna
o Highmark
o UnitedHealth
o WellPoint
- EHR provider, Epic, announced contracts with:
o Tucson Medical Center
o Kaiser
- Two senators attempt to expand who can get the HITECH subsidies from Medicare and Medicaid:
o Sheldon Whitehouse & Jack Reed of Rhode Island introduced bill
o Want monies to be available for EHR implementation by mental health, behavioral health and substance abuse treatment professionals
o Currently, psychiatrists are eligible, but not psych hospitals, clinical social workers and substance abuse programs
- Another healthcare data security issue. Someone broke into a Texas allergy clinic and stole four PCs containing personal health information (PHI). It cost the clinic $15,000 to send the mandatory breach notifications letters to its 25,000 patients, far more than the cost of replacing the computers.
- And another. Four Massachusetts community hospitals are investigating how thousands of patient records ended up in a pile at a local dump site that was 20 feet wide and 20 feet long. A newspaper photographer discovered the records when he was dumping his own trash, and notified the 4 hospitals; Milford, Holyoke, Carney and Milton.
- The Department of Health & Human Services announced that in 2007, Medicare overpaid physicians by $13.8 million for incorrectly coded claims.
- Eclipsys (which was just acquired by Allscripts) announced it won an EHR contract from Isabel Healthcare of Falls Church, VA.
- Allscripts, maker of EHR software, announced it has hired former U.S. Attorney, Ken Alexander, as its new Executive VP and General Counsel. It also announced it won a contract from the Iowa Health System.
- According to an Institute of Medicine study, 1.5 million Americans are injured each year and 7,000 die from preventable medication errors.
-=Greetings from the Highlands=-
