Friday 6 April 2012

Explanation Of The EHR Meaningful Use Condition For Recipients Of The Stimulus Program

By Douglas S. Burka


There are important reasons why EHR meaningful use was formulated as a condition for medical practices to be eligible for the electronic record stimulus incentive program. The use of certified EHR technology helps enhance the quality and safety of the practice, and additionally increases efficiency. Care coordination is enhanced and health disparities are reduced as demonstrated by this use. It has been demonstrated that patients and their families have more engagement in their health care. Overall public health of the population is enhanced as a result. At the same time as all this is being achieved, privacy and security is retained across all areas. Another key consideration to qualify for electronic health record stimulus incentives is achieving ease of use for the physician in the clinical setting.

Implementing electronic health record software can easily enhance the workflow and profitability of your practice. A paperless office is an additional advantage of using this technology. The many advantages from using EHR include improving office productivity, enhances patient satisfaction, raises the quality of care, facilitates adherence to compliance guidelines, has the capability of capturing more revenue, and supports data information exchange within the continuum of care. You can create an environment that will promote administrative, financial and clinical productivity allowing you to focus more on patient care when you use electronic health record software to supplement your existing work flow.

Access to patient records is allowed on role based security access for authorized health care professionals to assure their privacy and security. Access privileges are designated by the health care professionals responsibility for the patient. An audit trail is provided as an added security feature which includes capture of user activity and tracking to disclose who has accessed or changed the patient data. Safety and protection of the data is assured by the use off-site backups performed regularly.

An additional benefit of using electronic health records is revenue cycle management. Economic growth can also be experienced by the practice from the economic stimulus incentive. Improved claims acceptance rates can cause additional revenue capture by using a combination of practice management and electronic health records software systems. Usually the revenue gain will exceed the Electronic Health Records Meaningful Use stimulus reimbursement. By reducing claims rejections to less than five percent, the annual cost of Electronic Health Records software when used in combination with Practice Management software can be recouped within three months of implementing the software in an average practice.

The software company's tremendous experience with the claims system results in this improvement. They understand the environment through the volume of claims handled through their system in various practice specialties. They are able to continuously adjust the software to adapt to payer rule changes. This great improvement on your claims processing together with the exceptional incentives of up to $44,000 for Medicare Eligible Physicians and up to $63,750 for Medicaid Eligible Professionals implementing electronic health records will definitely improve your financial growth.




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