CMS
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Apixio Illuminates The Pain of Recording Patient Risk Factors (Part 1)
Many of us strain against the bonds of tradition in our workplace, harboring a secret dream that the industry could start afresh, streamlined and free of hampering traditions. But history weighs on nearly every field, including my own (publishing) and the one I cover in this blog (health care). Applying technology in such a field often involves the legerdemain of extracting new value from the imperfect records and processes with deep roots. Along these lines, when Apixio aimed machine learning and data analytics at health care, they unveiled a business model based on measuring risk more accurately so that Medicare Advantage payments to health care payers and providers reflect their patient populations more appropriately...
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Apixio Illuminates The Pain of Recording Patient Risk Factors (Part 2)
The previous section of this article introduced Apixio’s analytics for payers in the Medicare Advantage program. Now we’ll step through how Apixio extracts relevant diagnostic data. Providers usually submit SOAP notes to the Apixio web site in the form of PDFs. This comes to me as a surprise, after hearing about the extravagant efforts that have gone into new CCDs and other formats such as the Blue Button project launched by the VA. Normally provided in an XML format, these documents claim to adhere to standards and offer a relatively gentle face to a computer program. In contrast, a PDF is one of the most challenging formats to parse: words and other characters are reduced to graphical symbols, while layout bears little relation to the human meaning of the data...
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Big Data Saves Michigan $1 Million Each Business Day
Big Data is saving the state of Michigan $1 million each business day, while consolidating 40 data centers into three saved $19 million the first year. Read More »
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Black Book Research Warns Gov. Regs and Lousy EHRs are Driving Independent Medical Practices into Extinction
Two-thirds of independent practices now deliberately selling out to hospital systems and larger groups or closing down by 2019 as the resource-intensive requirements of MIPS, administrative burdens, and under-optimized technology may make the transition to value-based care too discouraging...Despite small practice education, training and technical assistance programs promised from CMS to help onboard physicians with the MACRA programs, 89% of the remaining solo practices expect to minimize Medicare volumes as to not be required to submit reports for the quality and clinical practice improvement activities or report in the cost performance category.
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CHIME Asks ONC to Rethink NwHIN
CHIME submitted comments this week to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, responding to the agency’s vision for nationwide health information exchange. ONC officials in May released a Request for Information (RFI) that sought feedback on how to establish a governance mechanism for the nationwide health information network (NwHIN). Read More »
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CMS, NASA Team for Software Contest
CMS is partnering with a branch of NASA to launch an open-source software contest aimed at improving the provider screening process for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. Read More »
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Datapalooza Spotlights Public, Private Hunger for Health Innovation
Innovators are using federal health and population data to jumpstart online and mobile applications to make information more usable and relevant to clinicians and consumers. The Health Data Initiative Forum is featuring the work of 100 companies or applications solutions culled from 245 that applied to demo at the show.
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DME Bidding Program Seen as Success; Further Study Urged
The first year of the CMS' durable medical-equipment competitive-bidding program was successful, but more experience with competitive bidding is needed to learn if there are access problems for beneficiaries, a new federal report found. Read More »
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DocGraph Hop Teaming Dataset Released at Datapalooza
Today CareSet Labs released the DocGraph Hop Teaming Dataset at Datapalooza. This dataset is the most comprehensive open map of the healthcare system in the United States. It is also the largest graph dataset available as open data that uses real names. This release represents the transition of the DocGraph dataset from a dataset maintained by Medicare/CMS, to a dataset that CareSet Systems will maintain and publish on their website going forward. “It’s called the HOP dataset because it more carefully follows the patients’ journey from provider to provider,” says Fred Trotter, CTO, CareSet Systems.
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EHealth To Obama: We Can Run HealthCare.gov
eHealth, which operates a leading online health insurance site, ehealthinsurance.com, has proposed that it temporarily take over the enrollment process for HealthCare.gov while government contractors try to fix the federally run insurance exchange, which has had multiple problems in signing people up for health insurance. Read More »
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EHR Interoperability a Source of Pain and Debate in Vermont
The lack of interoperability stems from innovation outpacing standardization. Because of the lack of proper guidance from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which is charged with providing specifications for health information technology (IT), and other federal agencies during the earliest phases of EHR implementation, it is likely that Vermont isn’t the only state suffering these growing pains.
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FTC Commissioner: Accountable Care Organizations Will Likely Lead to 'Higher Costs and Lower Quality Health Care'
In August, I wrote about how hospital monopolies are the biggest driver of health costs that nobody talks about. These powerful hospital chains know that insurers have no choice but to accept their jacked-up rates, and the cost of health insurance goes up whenever it suits their needs. Now, according to remarks by Federal Trade Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch, it turns out that accountable care organizations—one of Obamacare’s most touted policy gizmos—could make this problem far worse. Read More »
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GAO Finds That 16 Percent of Eligible Hospitals Received EHR Incentives
More than two-thirds of the hospitals that received Medicare EHR incentive payments for 2011 are in urban areas, according to a new GAO report, which slices and dices who received how much, when, and where. Read More »
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Government's Push to Unleash Health Data 'Transformative'
FierceHealthIT recently caught up with founder and Chief Instigator Mark Scrimshire in Washington, D.C., to ask him about the importance of HealthCamp and to get his thoughts on the state of health IT in the U.S. today. Read More »
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Halamka: Advice to the New National Coordinator
Karen DeSalvo started as the new National Coordinator for Healthcare Information Technology on January 13, 2014. After my brief discussion with her last week, I can already tell she's a good listener, aware of the issues, and is passionate about using healthcare IT as a tool to improve population health...What advice would I give her, given the current state of healthcare IT stakeholders?
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