Posted by EHR Analyst on Thu, Feb 18, 2010 @ 02:03 AM
Surescripts, The Nation's E-Prescription Network, today announced that it has lowered the cost of
e-prescribing services used millions of times each day by physicians, pharmacists and payers nationwide. After six years of no price increases, the announcement illustrates how replacing a manual, paper-based process with health information technology creates a more efficient and, ultimately, lower-cost means of providing care.
Surescripts operates the nation's largest e-prescription network and supports a rapidly expanding ecosystem of healthcare organizations nationwide. Surescripts was founded on the principles of neutrality, transparency, interoperability, education, collaboration and quality. Surescripts' e-prescribing services allow physicians to electronically send prescriptions from their offices to any of 52,000 retail pharmacies and six of the largest mail-order pharmacies. In addition, Surescripts provides physicians with electronic access to their patients' prescription benefit and prescription history, which helps to improve safety and enables doctors to prescribe medications with the lowest out-of-pocket cost to the patient. Beginning Jan. 1, 2010, Surescripts reduced what pharmacies, pharmacy vendors and pharmacy benefit managers pay for e-prescribing.
Read full press release here.
Posted by EHR Analyst on Tue, Feb 16, 2010 @ 12:48 AM
Members of a federal health IT advisory group last week proposed to relax the number of measures that will be required for healthcare providers to demonstrate "
meaningful use" of
electronic health record systems.
The Health & Human Service Department's meaningful use workgroup crafted an approach they said strikes a "middle ground" between too few and too onerous a set of measures of meaningful use necessary to qualify providers for financial incentives under HHS's health IT adoption plan.
The workgroup, which reports to HHS's Health IT Policy Committee, proposed that physicians and hospitals could drop up to six meaningful use measures for 2011.
That would still require providers to meet about 80 percent of the measures of meaningful use originally proposed, said Dr. George Hripcsak, the co-chair of the workgroup and a biomedical informatics professor at Columbia University.
Altogether healthcare providers must perform 25 different measures of meaningful use objectives such as e-prescribing and computerized physician order entry, based on proposed rules issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid published last month.
But some healthcare providers say the number of measures for 2011 is too burdensome and that "the bar is set too high," according to work group members at a meeting Feb. 12.
Read here for the complete story.