As a physician and long-time EHR user, I live and work in a world of discrete, narrative and non-narrative data. Notes that I or my colleagues have entered into the EHR, documents that have been scanned as image files or pdf documents into the document repository and discrete elements such as laboratory results. The data…

Guest Editorial The healthcare industry does not have a rich culture of innovation. While regulatory burdens, enterprise developers, and even generation gaps have taken heat for causing grief over the course of the Meaningful Use program (RIP), there is a legacy of change-resistance in medicine that goes much further than the last ten years. As…

A January 20, 2016 Health Affairs Article by Dawn M. Heisey-Grove titled Variation In Rural Health Information Technology Adoption And Use (Health Affairs, no.(2016): doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0861) examines the differences between different provider groups in rural vs. urban settings. According to Heisey-Grove, initial adoption levels amongst rural providers was higher than their urban counterparts. “In 2013,…

Guest Editorial A recent survey of office-based physicians looked into the state of revenue cycle management (RCM) across various specialties, staff and locations. The RCM Survey Report called “What’s Happening Behind the Billing Office Door” evaluated several high-level metrics including first-pass clean-claim rate, net collection percentages, average days in A/R, and outstanding collections for 120+ days. The…

The American College of Physicians (ACP), the American Medical Association (AMA), and the Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA) are co-sponsoring the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Usability Workshop in Chicago on December 8, 2015. This free, day-long event will bring together clinicians and EHR developers, providing the opportunity to better understand and practice successful techniques for…

The inaugural Federal Health IT Strategic Plan was released in 2011, and since then over 450,000 eligible professionals and 4,800 eligible hospitals have received an incentive payment for participation in the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs. This progress has taken a tremendous effort on behalf of hospitals and health care providers, as…

Over the past 4 years, there has been a major shift in the world of healthcare. The medical community has had greater influence from the government, insurance companies, lawyers, and like the rest of our society, an overarching increase in digital technology. Thus, the emergence of mainstream electronic health records (EHRs). People in present day…

One of the single biggest complaints that we hear from Physicians when referring to their EHR system is how computers take away from the personal side of patient care. All too often docs are now forced to dig through various screens, and drop down menus while they type in copious amounts of data during patient…

Guest Editorial by Benjamin Shibata If you want to give hospital clinicians severe heart burn or an arrhythmia, talk to them about implementing a new state-of-the-art electronic health record (EHR) system.  Although EHRs may seem like an intuitive improvement over paper health records, the transition has been a huge headache because the process is being…

The University of Health Sciences Berkley has developed an interesting graphic on the Data of Health Care, exploring the health data revolution, the difference between Electronic Medical Records and EHRs, which states and practices adopted electronic systems, and what the future of the digital health industry could look like. Click here to view

Over the past week, AmericanEHR has received hundreds of EHR ratings and comments from physicians across the US as part of a survey that we are conducting with the American Medical Association. Having both used an EHR for many years as well as going through a recent implementation in an Addiction Medicine practice, I have…