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…

The latest release of Meaningful Use (MU) Attestation Data by HealthData.gov shows that as of Feb. 3, 2016 there had been 998,709 MU attestations. Epic Systems Corporation continues to be the market share leader amongst certified EHR systems. “EpicCare Ambulatory – Core EMR” is the single most attested EHR with 110,173 providers qualifying for meaningful…

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…

Our mission at AmericanEHR is to facilitate the adoption and use of health information technology to reduce the cost of care and improve healthcare delivery. While our primary focus has been surrounding EHR adoption, and implementation, we’ve been steadily expanding our focus to include reviews, feedback, resources and market share data surrounding other medical technologies….

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,…

Last week active CMS Administrator, Andy Slavitt, announced the phasing out of Meaningful Use “as we know it.” This week ONC National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo and Andy Slavitt have expanded on plans for upcoming changes to the Meaningful Use program on the CMS blog. While many media outlets (AmericanEHR included) reported that Meaningful Use…

Speaking at the  J.P. Morgan Annual Health Care Conference on Jan. 11, 2016, Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt announced that CMS is in the process of ending Meaningful Use and moving to a new regime culminating with the MACRA implementation. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (also known as MACRA) was signed into…

For the second year in a row AmericanEHR’s blog has made the list of the Top 50 Health IT Blogs by CDW Healthcare. The healthcare technology community is abuzz these days with a number of key topics from mHealth to patient engagement, senior care to ACOs, ICD-10 to EHRs. There are so many diverse insights…

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…

The recent release of the AmericanEHR Partners research report, Physicians Use of EHR Systems 2014 prompted a number of media responses, one of which questioned the process and methodology by which the data was collected from target populations in conjunction with professional society partners. In order to respond to the question of survey populations, I…

For those of you who spend time caring for patients, rather than keeping up to date on every proposed regulation that comes out of CMS, here are the highlights of one that directly affects you. On April 15, CMS published a proposed rule that makes dramatic changes in Stage 2 of Meaningful Use (MU). Essentially,…