Opinion

A collection of 439  Posts

Is EMR Adoption on the Rise? Or is the market frozen until next year?

I got a note from the nice folks at Software Advice reminding us that this Friday marks the close of the first reporting period for Recovery Act funds. Any grants or loans awarded between February 17th (the signing of the bill) and September 30th will be reported in the survey (and subsequently show up at www.recovery.gov). We are all especially eager in the healthcare community to see the results of reporting to find out if the Stimulus Bill has had any impact on EMR adoption rates.

On Jan. 15, 2009 the United States Department of Health and Human Services released the final rules for the updated X12 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) transaction definitions, version 005010 to be used in conjunction with HIPAA and completed by January 2013. At the same time, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) standard has been bumped from ICD-9 to ICD-10 with a compliance date of October 2013. These aggressive compliance mandates, coupled with the close relationship between HIPAA transaction sets that can directly refer to ICD-9 or ICD-10 codes have health industry IT professionals scrambling.

These days I gets lots of emails with questions like “What’s RxNorm?” and “How should we use UMLS in our software?” These subject areas are important to cover because if you’re doing any work in healthcare interoperability and don’t know about UMLS and code sets like RxNorm then you really should get up to speed quickly. Charlie Harp over at ClinicalArchitecture.com has put together a great 15 minute overview of RxNorm and the UMLS Metathesaurus.

I just ran across Robin Wauters’ post over at TechCrunch about 10 Words I Would Love To See Banned From Press Releases. It’s a great summary of my own frustrations as a blogger who sees tons of press releases a week. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing emails about new products and services and I welcome submissions of press releases or other announcements to media@healthcareguy.com. Like most bloggers, I’m happy to get engaging emails and I respond to almost all messages that are addressed specifically to me (as opposed to a general mailling list) and look like they weren’t sent as a mass e-mail.

_ Most of us in the healthcare IT believe the ARRA (stimulus) bill is a Good Thing for the industry in general. Many existing companies will be able to sell more products and many new companies will be formed to create electronic medical records solutions. I was talking to Dr. Bill Cast last week about EMRs and what he and other physicians thought about them in general and I got some great feedback.

I grew up in Houston and normally it’s not exactly the best place to be in the middle of Summer (it’s pretty hot and humid); however, this Summer is different because we have the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in healthcare unconference taking place next week. This is a conference/unconference about Free and Open Source Software in Healthcare. Open Source was specifically mentioned in the Hi-Tech portion of the stimulus bill!

Many of you out there are looking at the ARRA (stimulus) bill for ways to sell your healthcare IT wares to healthcare providers. One of the weaknesses of most tech-focused companies is that don’t spend enough time on market research to figure out where to sell their products. That’s primarily because it’s not always easy to get useful statistics so here’s a little advice I give to my startups when they ask “where do I find out how many doctors there are in the country?

Discover Magazine asks Can Training in Second Life Teach Doctors to Save Real Lives? While many in the tech world are looking at the ARRA Stimulus Bill’s money being spent on EMRs and giving the world the thousandth version of a medical records system it’s great to see some creative technologists are using their brains on simulations and training programs that could actually make better doctors, not just more efficient administrators.

_I get a lot of questions asking for advice on how to build mobile software and one of the most popular questions is about how and where to save data on a mobile device (because of HIPAA and privacy rules). I reached out to Adam Kenney, a software engineer pMDsoft who leads a team of developers focused on mobile charge capture. Adam and his team have been building medical apps for mobile platforms and his insights arise from direct experience managing the design, development, and support of native applications for the Palm, BlackBerry, and iPhone.

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