Hide Caption
Even the all-powerful Pointing has no control about the blind texts it is an almost unorthographic life One day however a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar. The Big Oxmox advised her not to do so, because there were thousands of bad Commas.
Credit: iStockPhoto
Show Caption
AirStrip Technologies, which develops medical monitoring apps for mobile devices, announced this week that it has developed a tool that hospitals and medical practices can use to track their compliance with meaningful use incentives for electronic health records (EHRs).
In doing so, the company is helping its customers with a big challenge: meeting the demand for consumerization while navigating incredibly complicated laws that sometimes push organizations in conflicting directions.
Here's the background.
Why JC Penney Employees Call Their iPod Touches "Libby"
CITE Goes Live! Register for the CITE Conference & Expo, June 2-4, in San Francisco.
Healthcare facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements from the U.S. government are eligible for financial incentives for implementing and using EHR systems under the 2009 HITECH Act. To receive the incentives, facilities must meet meaningful use requirements that show they are increasing their use of electronic systems while decreasing reliance on paper records.
The HITECH Act set aside $18 billion in incentives to be distributed through the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement systems, so there's a huge opportunity for healthcare organizations and the vendors who sell to them. But there's a catch: the law directed the Department of Health and Human Services to establish meaningful use objectives that must be met to receive incentive payments.
These meaningful use objectives are complicated, and reflect the state of the IT industry overall -- including the consumerization trend and the related adoption of mobile devices. (The iPhone and iPad are the most popular devices used by doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.)
This is particularly reflected in the stage two requirements, which go into effect in 2014. They include specific references to tablet devices, security and privacy requirements for systems used to access data from or to store data on mobile devices of any type, and options for using mobile apps as source of patient engagement.
This puts healthcare administrators and IT professionals in a uniquely difficult position. Like other IT professionals, they are dealing with the rapid shift to mobile devices, demands for bring your own device (BYOD) options, and an increasing number of consumer-oriented cloud services and social networks. Riding that wave is difficult for any IT organization in a heavily regulated industry -- like healthcare.
At the same time, they need to be pushing forward with systems to meet the requirements for increasing deployment and use of electronic systems.
AirStrip's Meaningful Use Tracker will offer real-time analysis of meaningful use metrics -- a feature that will help administrators and IT staff, as well as healthcare professionals, track compliance and make adjustments to policies, procedures, and provider habits based on live data. This immediate analysis means less risk of delays that could prevent organizations from collecting incentive payments.
