Health Management Technology articles from September 2005

Health Management Technology archives from September 2005

The math of healthcare.(From the Editor)
September 1, 2005... One night in late June, I sat down to read U.S. News & World Report, expecting to read half the issue. Instead, I read one article four times. My paternal grandmother died more than three decades ago. She had Alzheimer's. Although we know...

$156 billion NHIN model is on the table.(National Health Information Network)
September 1, 2005... Building a nationwide network of computerized healthcare information is doable in five years, and researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard University say it will cost $156 billion in capital expenses and $48 billion in...

Patient safety bill finally passes.(Legislative Watch: Medical Errors)
September 1, 2005... Nearly six years after the Institute of Medicine report on medical errors, the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement bill won final congressional approval on July 27 and was signed into law by President Bush on July 29. Under the...

EHR bill may spur competition for dollars.(Legislative Watch: EHRs and ONCHIT)
September 1, 2005... Hospitals and physicians could compete for federal grants to help buy or improve EHR systems under provisions of a bill passed in late July by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. To fast track healthcare IT...

New quality measures from NCQA.(Health Plans and Payers)
September 1, 2005... Fifty-seven health plans signed on in August as early adopters of new Care Management and Health Improvement standards by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). Over the next several months, the health plans will be surveyed...

IT helps monitor patients with chronic disorders.(Physician Practices)
September 1, 2005... The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) is launching a project to demonstrate how doctors can use home monitoring technology to improve patient care and gain at least a 5 percent net savings in costs for Medicare patients with chronic...

Shortfall in Senate funding.(healthcare information technology )(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... Shortfall in Senate Funding. The Senate Appropriations Committee in July approved $95.2 million for healthcare information technology as part of a $146 billion FY2006 spending bill, with $45.2 million slated for ONCHIT and $50 million to the...

"Free" software not so free.(Briefly)
September 1, 2005... "Free" Software Not So Free. In early August, CMS was preparing to issue EHR software to physician offices. After an article in The New York Times said the software was free, HHS officials issued statements to set the record straight. The...

Clinical data standards: case histories.(Briefly)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... Clinical Data Standards: Case Histories. The California Healthcare Foundation issued a new report on clinical data standards, critical for future interoperability. The 24-page report includes case studies that highlight five different...

Bolstering bottom lines: nowhere is the domino effect more noticeable than in healthcare organizations that strengthen their coding functions and claims operations with specialized software. It streamlines and expedites coding, reduces A/R days and helps bring in more revenue.(Claims and Coding)(Cover Story)
September 1, 2005... Like love and marriage or a horse and carriage, coding and claims go together. Without accurate coding, claims submitted to payers stand an almost certain chance of being rejected. At the very least, submission of claims must be delayed until...

Claims & coding hotlist.
September 1, 2005... Claims & Coding HotList Payers Axonwave Software Inc. 873-595 Burrard St. Vancouver, BC Canada V7X1C4 800-332-0021 Axonwave's Claim Recovery Management System is...

Like it? Yes. Need it? Yes. Buy it? Nah: in an exclusive HMT survey, physicians demonstrate that they whole-heartedly understand and support healthcare IT, but they're not yet queuing up to buy every last piece of software.(Rx Management/e-Prescribing)
September 1, 2005... When it comes to information technology, only in healthcare and only with physicians does the word "adoption" assume extraordinary significance. Physicians in hospitals and in private practice constitute a bloc that doesn't exist in other...

Capacity management: the bedrock of efficiency: Houston hospital takes the creative high road to managing patient flow and beds with wireless technology and hand-helds.(Workflow Automation: Case History)
September 1, 2005... What's the most expensive table in a restaurant? Any restaurant manager will tell you: It's the empty table. Hospitals aren't so different. An empty bed is a bed that is not generating revenue. Worse yet is when that bed could have been...

Securing the healthcare border: healthcare professionals need access to patient information 24/7. Protecting it may be an IT organization's greatest challenge--or nightmare.(Remote Access)
September 1, 2005... The tremendous expansion of the distributed healthcare network has increased the demands for remote information availability. The ability to provide patient data to the extended network gives hope to increased service levels, reduced diagnosis...

Streamlining pediatric patient care: Ohio pediatric hospital centrally automates scheduling among outpatient clinics to care for more young patients, improve customer service and build revenue.(Scheduling: Case History)
September 1, 2005... Columbus Children's Hospital in Ohio improved customer service and patient care and increased revenue by automating and centralizing how affiliated pediatric physician offices scheduled tests and referral visits to subspecialists at the...

Saving lives with teletrauma video communications: trauma surgeons provide consultative services to rural communities using state-of-the-art videoconferencing technology.(Telemedicine/Telehealth: Case History)
September 1, 2005... Studies show rural trauma patients die twice as often as those in urban areas. Why? Time, distance and training are the primary culprits. Longer discovery times after injury, greater distances to travel for treatment and the availability--or...

Brink of the future: AHIMA convention addresses the status of the new classification system, how consumer-driven health efforts and national and regional EHR initiatives are affecting the role of the HIM professional, plus other hot topics.(AHIMA Preview)
September 1, 2005... Unless, like VanWinkle, they have fallen asleep in a forgotten document storage room for 20 years, every single member of every medical records department knows ICD-10 is coming. It is needed, wanted and already at work elsewhere around the...

Right from the start: a Colorado ambulatory surgery center uses software to deliver clinical efficiency to physicians and timely billing and reimbursement to the back office.(Clinical Information Systems: Case History)
September 1, 2005... Physicians at Harmony Ambulatory Surgery Center in Fort Collins, Colo., opted for efficiency when they first opened their doors in 2000. They bypassed traditional dictation and transcription options for the clinical documentation that follows...

Superspeed servers.(Hardware: Servers)
September 1, 2005... Overdrive PC's (OPC) Gemini SLI servers feature internal refrigeration units that freeze their dual-Athlon 64 X2 CPUs to 25 C when the system is at idle and keep it at or below 15 C when in use. OPC also overclocks the CPUs' default speeds of...

Server farm workhorse.(Hardware: Servers)
September 1, 2005... The Fujitsu/Siemens PRIMEPOWER 450 4U is a 4-way rack server with an XA system architecture that runs up to four SPARC64 V 1.87 GHz processors with up to 3 MB level-2 cache on-chip and a Solaris operating system. Up to 32 GB synchronous DDR...

More power, same price.(Hardware: Servers)
September 1, 2005... The Dell PowerEdge 6850 server is designed to offer up to 32 percent greater performance for approximately the same price as its predecessor. It features four 64-bit Intel Xeon processors MP running at up to 3.6 GHz, up to 8 MB L2 cache, and up...

Multiple OS server.(Hardware: Servers)
September 1, 2005... HP designed their Integrity Superdome Servers to provide unlimited program compatibility by giving them the ability to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Supported O/Ss include: Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition,...

SSO Medical App Portal.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... Orion Systems International, Inc., a provider of clinical workflow and integration software for healthcare, has rolled out Concerto 6.1, the latest upgrade to their single sign-on Medical Applications Portal (MAP). Beside single sign-on,...

Multilingual Web sites for hospitals.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... MedSeek's SiteMaker Content Management System now offers two solutions for the creation and management of multilingual hospital Web sites. The new features let users and hospital administrators change a Web site's language with the click of a...

Mature laboratory system.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... QuadraMed Corp. acquired a proven laboratory system from Detente Systems in 2004 and has reintroduced it as Affinity Laboratory. The system now includes general laboratory, as well as microbiology and anatomic pathology from specimen collection...

Point-of-Care dictation solution.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... MedAptus has released version 5.5 of its digital dictation module as an integrated part of its Point-of-Care Solution Suite. The module is designed to allow physicians the freedom during rounds to dictate audio to an HP iPAQ PocketPC or Dell...

Hybrid imaging systems.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... Philips Electronics has introduced 64-slice configurations of its hybrid PET/CT and SPECT/CT nuclear imaging systems. Designed to produce comprehensive images for oncology, cardiology and neurology, the Gemini GXL PET/CT and Precedence SPECT/CT...

Remote bedside monitoring.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... TeleVital Inc. has received FDA clearance for VitalWare VMS, its remote real-time bedside monitoring solution. The product is designed to stream a patient's vital signs from rural critical care locations to larger tertiary care facilities for...

Tablet PC for doctors.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... Motion Computing has introduced the LS800, a paperback-size tablet PC targeted at doctors who want to enter handwritten patient data while on the move and have it automatically converted into text that can be used by standard applications. At...

Contract management solution.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... Guardian Contract Manager from Kryptiq Corp. is a modular solution for medical payers who want to streamline their management of healthcare insurance contracts with providers. The application stores all contract information on a secure Web...

Automated claims status module.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... Payerpath Inc. now includes Payerpath Claims Status in its Payerpath Claims Management System. The integrated module is designed to let physician practices and hospitals query payers as to the status of a transmitted claim. Through the...

Revenue cycle reimbursement.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... MedAssets has released CrossWalk, part of their new Merge technology, which is designed to improve operating margins by identifying and correcting missed charges, undercharges and overcharges that exist between the supply chain and revenue data...

Angiography coding tool.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... CodeRyte has added automated coding for angiography to its natural language processing coding products. Because of the multiple CPT-4 codes needed for each procedure angiograms require more time and effort to code compared to other procedures....

Automated OPL case review.(News Products & Services)
September 1, 2005... Insurance Automation Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Workgroup Technology Partners, has released iAutomate: OPL CaseManager Lite, a Web-based version of their OPL (other-party liability) enterprise solution. Unlike the enterprise version,...

Patient privacy: the right to know versus the need to access.(Thought Leaders)
September 1, 2005... Computerization of clinical information, while offering new opportunities to improve and streamline the healthcare delivery system, also presents new challenges for those whose job it is to protect the use and potential misuse of that...