In The News 07/08/2008

Best Careers for 2008

32% of RNs Say They Shouldn’t Be Driving After Work  

Thought everyone might be interested in this article from the Congressional Budget Office on the Evidence on the costs and benefits of health information technology. It might help with those trying to determine metrics for the implementation of an EHR.

Telehealth Promise…Better Health Care and Cost Savings for the 21st Century – report from AT&T Center for Telehealth research and Policy, U of Texas…

 

Telecare made easy…A very strong case can be made that the UK is way ahead of the US in Telecare.

 

Advances in electronic medical records have led to the need for standardization of nursing language and "finding a place for nursing’s voice to be heard," says a Florida Atlantic University professor of nursing. She is working on an e-records model that will allow nurses to enter not only medical data but also their notes on relationships with patients

A great website concept for connecting cancer survivors.

 

Has anyone seen the new device from Amazon called the "Kindle."  If they actually start having nursing and medical textbooks be available, this might actually have a place in the health care sector.

 

Here are some EMR/EHR company spoof sites.  This is too funny.  If you do not read teh fine prints, you can be fooled to thinking it is a legitimate company.  Great website design at least.  Here you go:

• Extormity = “At the confluence of extortion and conformity lies Extormity, the electronic health records mega-corporation dedicated to offering highly proprietary, difficult to customize and prohibitively expensive healthcare IT solutions.”
• Seedie = “SEEDIE, the Society for Exorbitantly Expensive and Difficult to Implement EHR’s”

Nurses aren’t trained to be managers. They’re trained to be clinicians. So how can your hospital ensure that it is providing the additional training and leadership development needed to create the next generation of chief nursing officers…

Doctors using Virtual Approach.  Rush University Medical Center’s new study reports that elederly patients suffering from chronic illnesses receiving virtual care from a team of medical experts linked together via phone, fax, and email make fewer emergency room visits. Also download a presentation on the Virtual Integrated Practice approach.

CMS’ proposed rule to allow physicians to be reimbursed for telehealth follow-up inpatient consultations could encourage insurers to provide similar reimbursements, Modern Healthcare reports (Vesely, Modern Healthcare, 7/2).

Details of Proposed Rule

The proposed CMS rule for 2009 Medicare payments, released this week, would allow physicians to bill for electronic consultations following inpatient visits. It also would add new codes specifically for telemedicine consultations for health care providers who are consulted by a patient’s physician but are not available for in-person consultations (iHealthBeat, 6/30). The telehealth consultations would include monitoring a patient’s progress, recommending care-management changes or providing a new plan of care. The e-visits would be performed in real time with interactive communications systems in all states except for Alaska and Hawaii, where store and forward technology is being used in federal telemedicine demonstration projects, according to CMS. The three new billing codes would reflect the complexity of each different e-visit and the amount of time spent by the physician.

Private Insurers

Jonah Frolich, senior program officer for the California HealthCare Foundation, said that while e-visits are still new, some insurers already have begun reimbursing health care providers for the service. Five California insurers are paying $40 per e-visit, and some national plans have launched telemedicine reimbursement pilot projects, Frolich said. He added that insurers tend to adopt billing practices used by CMS (Modern Healthcare, 7/2).

Considering telecare for someone with dementia.  In this social worker’s blog he/she describes going to assess a client for the first time. It’s heartening to see that some form of telecare is automatically considered as part of that process