May 18, 2011 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
blog
At the “Health IT in an Era of Accountable Care: Update from the Beacon Communities” meeting, hosted by the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings (Washington, D.C.) in collaboration with The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) payment reform was one of the topics at the forefront of the conversation. With WellPoint Inc. announcing its mandatory value-based purchasing program, the time has never been more prescient for continuing the conversation about getting payers involved in quality-based medicine and payments.
January 31, 2011 Ajay Kandelwal
article
What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Thanks to wonderful marketing programs, courtesy of both software consultants and vendors, you may already know what it is. In fact, you might know a little too much-vendors create buzzwords to package “old” products into “new” concepts, which often leads to confusion regarding SOA and its associated terms, such as, Web services, enterprise service bus (ESB), and business process management (BPM). It's not surprising that you may be asking yourself some fundamental questions: How can SOA affect patient care? Can SOA improve the state of technology in a healthcare organization? How are other industries adapting SOA? And, should you start working on SOA before your boss hears about it at a Gartner Conference? If you are asking these questions, rest assured, you're not alone.
November 28, 2010 Mark Hagland
article
While the outlook for the U.S. economy in general, and the hospital and healthcare economy in particular, continues to appear mixed these days, some industry experts are seeing a definite, if gradual, shift towards increased confidence among many hospital senior executives, when it comes to reaching out for the capital to make new and expanded investments, particularly in information technology. One expert who is seeing this in concrete terms is Randy Waring, who is managing director at the Brookfield, Wis.-based GE Capital Financial Healthcare Services.
October 21, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
Utah started building its All-Payer Claims Database (APCD) three years ago to bring public transparency to the cost of healthcare. Last September the APCD started collecting claims data from four commercial payers, and is now analyzing episodes of care ranging from maternity to chronic disease management. Utah's APCD has more than 2.2 million unique Utahns identified, linked, and grouped, and more than $10.5 billion Utah healthcare claims charges represented. Keely Cofrin Allen, Ph.D, the director of the Office of Healthcare Statistics at the Utah Department of Health spoke with HCI Associate Editor Jennifer Prestigiacomo about the competing priorities she has to balance and what laid the foundation for her organization’s success.
August 25, 2010 Mark Hagland
article
Earlier this summer, a team of researchers from the Santa Monica, Calif.-based RAND Corporation examined issues around pay for performance initiatives in five different industries: transportation, child care, education, emergency response, and healthcare. The researchers wanted to find out what issues, potential, and pitfalls, the various industries had around performance-based payment of some sort.
June 24, 2010 Mark Hagland
blog
My colleague and friend Yancey Casey in media relations at McKesson had a very clever idea, which he executed at the HFMA-ANI Conference this week.
February 1, 2010
blog
My son was very proud of his new car audio system. It even came with an iPhone adapter. My only question to him was; “Don’t you still have engine problems?” It struck me that many organizations approach IT upgrades and installs much the same way. They take on an IT project before working on the Revenue Engine!
January 29, 2010 Mark Hagland
article
Whatever the controversies around health insurance reform on Capitol Hill, there's a strong bipartisan consensus as to the need for reimbursement reform, including a shift towards value-based healthcare purchasing under Medicare. For healthcare CIOs who will need to implement data reporting and sharing systems that can facilitate new reimbursement arrangements nationwide, the implications are huge.
October 7, 2009 Anthony Guerra
article
With its carrot-like incentives, HITECH has placed severe demands on healthcare providers throughout the country to adopt electronic medical records and computerized physician order entry.
September 22, 2009
blog
Why Absolute Value-Based Purchasing is better than Relative Value-Based Purchasing.
September 13, 2009 Marc D. Paradis
blog
Remember your first day of college orientation? Do you remember when that college president or dean gathered all of the incoming freshman into an auditorium and said these words “Now, look to your left and look to your right - one of you won’t be here in 4 years … because our graduation rate is 2/3 of our matriculation rate.”?
September 3, 2009
blog
A good friend of mine has a favorite saying which states “given enough, time, money and resources, anything is possible”.
