EMR/EHR

An opinion piece from Jonathan Bush, the CEO, President, and Chairman of the Board of athenahealth Inc. recently caught my attention. Bush was advocating for better venture capital investment in healthcare IT and made a pertinent point about how fee-for-service models of reimbursement have stifled innovation.

Ninety-three percent of U.S. doctors report actively using electronic medical records (EMR), and nearly half (45 percent) of doctors surveyed said they regularly access clinical data outside their own organization, representing a 32 percent annual increase, according to consulting firm Accenture.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs), when used correctly, produce more accurate documentation leading to more complete coding, and ultimately, more accurate reimbursement claims, according to Sue Bowman, senior director of coding policy and compliance of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), during her presentation on May 3 at a listening session hosted by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center has announced that 25,000 people have signed on to participate in its biobank program, BioMe, where each patient has broadly consented to DNA sequencing, contact from researchers, and longitudinal studies related to data embedded in the electronic medical record (EMR).

As I write this column, the news has just broken that scientists at the University of Texas-Austin have developed an “invisibility cloak”—something at least conceptually akin to the shroud that Harry Potter wore in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows,” as he floated around the Hogwarts School and other places and spied on people and snuck into places where he wasn’t supposed to go.