Maryland law will allow state to put stimulus cash toward electronic health records

Maryland law will allow state to put stimulus cash toward electronic health records

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley will sign legislation Tuesday that provides incentives for health care organizations to implement electronic health records.

House Bill 706 allows the state to make use of federal stimulus dollars available for electronic health records and coordinate those efforts with the state’s own plan to create a state wide health information exchange.

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Another great show by HIMSS

HIMSS in Chicago was another great show featuring some of the best the healthcare informatics industry has to offer. While the attendance appeared to be down from last year, it was evident that health care facilities had sent their best people.

The weather was "classic" Chicago, offering plenty of wind and a generous portion of cold. The walk to food venues throughout Chicago proved to be quite a task if unprepared.

The major dissappointment was in the sessions about the economic stimulus package. Because the stimulus is still somewhat shrouded by details that have yet to be outlined, there were no concrete details about what to expect.

We really enjoyed demonstrating our network lock which is now available in our charting stations, computing stations and medication boxes. For many, the show really revealed all the great features that this security system has to offer. If you missed the demo, look at the video on our website OR wait a few weeks until the lock system video is completed. (I'll post specifically about the lock video as soon as its done.)

Overall, HIMSS09 was a great success and we look forward to exhibiting again at HIMSS10 in Atlanta, GA.

A special thanks to Colin at CMK Development for the use of one of his luxury condo's in downtown Chicago. It was amazing!

Fueled by incentives, now is the time to invest in an EMR

Cerner has some great resources on its website including webinars about the Economic Stimulus Package and EMR implementation.

From the CERNER Site:

The road to electronic health record (EHR) adoption just got a little sweeter for physicians with President Obama’s recent signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Widely referred to as the economic stimulus package, the act provides approximately $35 billion in Medicare and Medicaid incentives to eligible professionals for “meaningful use” of qualified EHR systems in their practices (use of a hospital EHR does not qualify the physician or provider for these incentives). Read More >>

What the Economic Stimulus Package Means for Healthcare

I was digging around last night and found an informative webcast which spells out the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It does not answer every question but it certainly helped make sense of the act.

The webcast was presented by Harry Greenspun, M.D., Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Perot Systems Healthcare Services. Click HERE to go to the webcast.

Perot Systems also has several other abstracts available that may help make sense of the stimulus package.

Review & Analysis of HITECH Act

The HITECH Act has been thoroughly reviewed and is throwing up some questions, as projected. One interesting word used in the act is the word "meaningful". Kind of a hard word to measure isn't it?

A company called Chilmark Research has read all 1,000 pages of the HITECH Act and have been posting findings on their blog. Very interesting. READ MORE >>

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Today Ed Jones writes on HIPAA home site about the new American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Tuesday afternoon the Senate passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the so-called Economic Stimulus bill. Previously, the House of Representatives passed its version, H.R. 1. Now, the joint House-Senate conference committee will resolve funding and language differences in the House and Senate versions of ARRA. As we have noted earlier, each of these versions contains incentives for adoption of health information technologies, which are described in the so-called HITECH provisions of the House and Senate versions. President Obama is expected to sign a reconciled bill in the near future, assuming that the Democrats in the Senate can achieve at least 60 votes in a procedural motion to move the bill to the floor of the Senate for a vote. Once signed into law, HIPAA.com will provide a detailed analysis of funding, language, and timeframe provisions of the reconciled HITECH provisions.

READ MORE>>>