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Insights Federal regulations continue to add data management and reporting requirements to health systems. Programs involving quality management and measurement, meaningful use attestation, ACO or Medical Home participation and HIPAA compliance add complexity in data understanding, collection and management across departments and facilities. Several major health care organizations have recently announced they will stop reporting hospital-acquired infection rates to a major quality measurement effort headed by The Leapfrog Group. The facilities, including Cleveland Clinic, Henry Ford (Detroit) and Parkview Hospital (Indiana), all point to increasing federal and state requirements for data quality reporting putting a resource strain on their facilities. As a direct result of this announcement, the Cleveland Clinic’s “worse than average” bloodstream infection rate was widely publicized in the media.
Coordinating – even centralizing – data governance efforts is critical to managing data intense relationships, and to managing the fallout when issues do arise. With so many mandatory and voluntary surveys and reporting programs in the market, health systems must develop a strategy. Included under that data governance umbrella should be data quality maintenance, cost-effective access strategies, and external data reporting agency relationship management. |
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Inside IT Optimizers®
Isil Arican, MD, MS, joins IT Optimizers’ staff, IT Optimizers is also fortunate to welcome back Ned Boatright, MBA, News The Supreme Court is hearing arguments about whether private parties can sue to block state Medicaid cuts. California slashed Medicaid reimbursement by 10%. States must get the Department of Health and Human Services approval of new rates, as a safety mechanism to ensure providers remain in the program. Read a transcript of the oral arguments.
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News (cont) In the state of Washington, the American College of Emergency Physicians has filed a lawsuit against a state plan to limit “non-emergent” ED visits for Medicaid recipients to three each year. The policy went into effect October 1st, and was developed in conjunction with 19 other states. See the court documents. The national focus on meaningful use of health information technology has had a strong impact on California doctors over the past few years, according to the California Healthcare Foundation’s “ State of Health Information Technology in California” (May 2011) report. A much larger percentage (47%) of community clinics report using an electronic health record than in previous years (3%). The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has launched the Query Health Initiative A public-private collaboration, QHI will strive to establish standards and services for distributed population queries of electronic health records (EHRs). The initiative will provide population analyses to guide clinical and payment strategies for both health systems and physician practices.
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offering clients increased expertise in clinical systems, EHR program management and MSO operations. Ms. Arican’s clinical patient care experience and payer-side management expertise have allowed her to immediately offer value to clients in multiple areas, including program management and meaningful use assessment and planning.
who returns to us as a Practice Director. Mr. Boatright’s 35 years of expertise in health care financing, benefits and information technology offer our clients valuable skills in interim management, program management and management operations.
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