CHIME

The subject of electronic health records, and the billions of dollars set aside to digitize the country, made national headlines this week – and not in a way that most proponents of health IT would have liked. Stemming from two independent analyses, headlines in The New York Times and the Washington Post detailed how greater use of electronic records might be making it easier for hospitals and doctors to submit erroneous payment claims.

During National Health IT Week, two pieces of legislation were announced-one that will focus on expanding incentive payments to safety net providers and the other to focus on privacy harmonization among state and federal standards. Introduced Thursday by Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) the Medicaid Information Technology to Enhance Community Health (MITECH) Act would extend Medicaid incentives to providers that practice predominantly in a qualified safety net clinic, QSNC.

The recent regulatory firestorm (from Meaningful Use and related certification criteria updates to ICD-10) gave way to last week’s political firestorm and real-world hurricane storm. The Republican convention was held in Tampa, Fla., while Hurricane Isaac reached the gulf coast shore in Louisiana and Mississippi. Keen observers of the GOP convention would tell you that healthcare policy was front and center during most – if not all – of the marquee speeches.

With Paul Ryan's views on Medicare well known, what about health IT? In 2006, Rep. Ryan cosponsored the Health Information Technology Promotion Act, which would have codified the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in statute, provide for a study of federal and state health privacy laws and standards, require a modern coding and transaction system and create a streamlined process for the adoption of transaction standards, among other things.

Use watchers this week were given a present from the Health IT Policy Committee’s MU Workgroup as preliminary recommendations for Stage 3 were released. According to workgroup members, Stage 3 would see a general increase in thresholds, new EHR functionalities, “consolidation” of previous objectives and a continuing trend to move menu objectives to core.