In January 2012, Healthcare IT News conducted a survey to identify drivers and challenges for developing and deploying a solution for centralized digital document delivery that complies with healthcare industry regulations. Read this report to learn the key findings from the survey investigating trends in the adoption of digital document management systems by healthcare institutions since the rollout of the <a href="/directory/health-information-technology-economic-and-clinical-health-hitech-act" target="_blank" class="directory-item-link">HITECH</a> Act’s financial incentive programs.

Recent headlines have raised plenty of eyebrows with record setting big-dollar penalties levied against healthcare organizations due to HIPAA violations. Industry experts surmise that this unprecedented trend is the result of significant changes that have occurred recently to HIPAA regulations.

Automated medication administration, electronic health records, computerized physician order entry (CPOE), barcode point-of-care (BPOC) and other automated procedures for improving patient care all rely on accurate input that barcoding can provide. This white paper will explain the role wristbands can play in improving patient safety and freeing nurses and other valuable medical personnel from paperwork and clerical tasks.

The CMS EHR Incentive program (commonly known as Meaningful Use) is not just about getting all providers to use EHRs. It’s creating a foundation of detail clinical and administrative data – all expressed in the same standard vocabulary – that can be used to automate the calculation and reporting of patient outcomes. With the shift from volume to value in care delivery and reimbursement models, comprehensive quality measures are an essential element – else how can we determine value? But the historical approach to measuring quality using manually abstracted data will not work in a healthcare environment focused on value. Quality metrics must be automated. The industry must shift to eMeasures – metrics calculated and reported based on data captured in the EHR as a by-product of care delivery. This spring, CMS published the timeline for implementing a unified set of electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) and e-reporting requirements intended to synchronize and integrate CMS quality programs and reduce provider reporting burden. Are you prepared to embark on the journey to the new generation of quality measures and reporting?

The Office of the National Coordinator has specified the use of RxNorm as the medication and medication allergy vocabulary constraint within certified systems which enable Meaningful Use Stage 2 clinical information exchanges. Specifications for the electronic computation of clinical quality measures (CQM) leverage “eMeasures” and their associations to medication and medication allergy value sets to enable the programmatic computation of summary CQM reports for CMS submission.