Clinical decision support tools, EHRs and mHealth platforms

Leaping leprechauns! Just like you don’t have to be Irish to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, you don’t have to be a tech whiz to appreciate the transformative power of healthcare IT. Lucky you — our HIT List this week is bursting with exciting developments including EHR optimization, clinical decision support tools and mHealth platforms!

Psst — here’s the secret to better data integrity. To produce cleaner, more comprehensive, more meaningful healthcare data, you need to optimize your EHR. Here are four steps that can help you make the most of your system, starting with assessing your technology tools and users to ensure EHR use is intuitive and seamless — and not cluttered with risky workarounds.
Lifesaving clinical decision support. Using advanced clinical decision support tools can reduce the mortality rate among the 1.1 million Americans treated annually for pneumonia, new research shows. By automatically providing a severity assessment along with recommendations on diagnostic testing and antibiotic selection, the digital tool saved up to 12 lives in each hospital where it was used, compared to routine care standards. That shows healthy promise, don’t you agree?
ACO success linked to IT. Technology is key to deploying the “Next Generation Accountable Care Organization” model introduced last week by CMS, say HIT stakeholders. As part of the effort to accelerate the shift from fee-for-service to risk capitation, participating providers will be expected to share information about EHR use and meaningful use progress, as well as use telehealth tools to better coordinate patient care. Time to double-check that you have the right infrastructure in place.
Welcome flexibility. If Congress passes the Electronic Health Fairness Act, ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) will be exempt from the EHR incentive program. That means physicians seeking to meet the meaningful use requirement that at least 50% of their outpatient encounters occur at locations equipped with EHR technology will not have to count patient encounters at ASCs. This is welcome news given that no EHR technology is currently certified for these centers, which often offer patients lower-cost alternatives for care. Certainly seems to address a catch-22, wouldn’t you say?
Hello, mHealth platform — good-bye, silos. For CIOs struggling to integrate systems and keep pace with emerging technologies that impact patient care, implementing mobile health platforms can offer unprecedented flexibility, security and efficiency. The platforms act as hubs, receiving lab results, secure texts and other information from across the healthcare enterprise and organizing it in a single place for mobile end users to view. Check out the three elements this physician considers absolutely essential to an effective platform.
A wealth of ICD-10 resources. To avoid headaches come October, physician practices should take advantage now of CMS testing and education opportunities, implement dual coding, and create simple specialty guides and crosswalks. A new research study includes 10 recommendations to help health information management professionals ease the ICD-10 transition for physicians. Take a look to see if you have any gaps to fill for your planning.
The telehealth transformation. These statistics make it clear that telehealth is poised to fundamentally change healthcare: 64% of Americans are willing to see a doctor via video and 7% (that’s 17 million, mind you) say they would change primary care doctors in order to take advantage of telehealth visits. Switching from in-person to telehealth visits when appropriate could save U.S. companies as much as $6 billion annually. With hospitals motivated to implement telehealth and patients eager to embrace it, it certainly seems like the sky’s the limit.