By mid-November, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) must respond to the legal complaint filed in a Maryland federal court by six Augusta, Georgia family physicians.These doctors are not asking for money, but for relief from the negative effects brought about by CMS’ twenty year reliance on the American Medical Association’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC) ...
Brian Klepper, PhD and David C. Kibbe, MD, MBA
Few doctors will meet meaningful use in 2011, and that’s ok
2011 will be a disappointing year for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator’s electronic health record incentive programs. We predict that few doctors and hospitals will meet the objectives set for the "meaningful use" of certified EHR technology. Meaningful use is, of course, the term that describes the objectives and measures providers and hospitals must meet in order to receive financial bonuses ...
How might we think about EHRs globally while acting locally?
American health care information technology is undergoing two enormous leaps.First, it is moving onto Web-based and mobile platforms – which are less expensive and facilitate information exchange – and away from client-server enterprise-centric technologies, which are more expensive and have limited interoperability. In addition, more EHR development activity is headed into the cloud, driven by large consumer-based firms with the technological depth to take it there. Both these trends ...
Physicians need to compare themselves with their peers
Imagine that an innovative health plan - aware that half or more of health care cost is waste and that physician costs to obtain the identical outcome can vary by as much as eight fold - hopes to sweep market share by producing better quality health care for a dramatically lower cost.So it begins to evaluate its vast data stores. It’s goal is to identify the specialists, outpatient services and ...
Why the Florida Medical Association (FMA) is angry with the AMA
At an Orlando meeting recently, Florida Medical Association (FMA) members fumed that their parent, the AMA, isn’t adequately representing Florida’s private practice doctors. After talk of secession and forming a new group, they settled for writing a stern letter urging the AMA to straighten up.The FMA dustup began with a resolution written by Douglas Stevens MD, a Fort Myers cosmetic surgeon – you can’t make this stuff up – complaining ...
