Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could have all of your health records right at your finger tips? With today’s advanced technologies, it is now a possibility! As you all know, healthcare is one of the most information-intensive industries, and therefore it is only fitting that it remains ahead of the technological curve. While you are all now implementing new electronic record keeping systems, you will find that it is the best way to share medical histories and maximize proper results when diagnosing a patient. The versatility and depth of EHR’s opens new doors and opportunities for you, whether it is as a patient or while practicing. While every industry tries to keep up with the product improvement and innovative designs of the technologies surrounding the medical field, companies like Dell, Compaq and Apple can not wait to get a piece of the action. When it comes to remote healthcare, the Android powered Streak is seemingly the most appealing, to date. The Streak is a smartphone that obtains application services from a mobile device as it, “delivers data via a Citrix environment and is HIPAA compliant,” which allows patients to access their personal medical histories from anywhere that they should need it. Having your health data at the touch of a button is nothing short of amazing as the healthcare field, as well as the rest of our world, transforms from a paper-based environment to completely electronic. Although the complete transformation will take much more time, I don’t think that it’s ever too soon to get on board as is the Dell Streak, Compaq Tablet or Apple iPhone or iPad.

So is it a tablet or a SmartPhone? The truth is, it is somewhere in between. As the iPad and Tablet are both amazingly small, touch screen computers, they would be able to access your medical records. And the iPhone is the industry leading smartphone, I find the Streak to be somewhere in the middle. With its 5 inch screen, it is easy for me to brush it off as an iPhone for Shaq and Yao Ming—a 5 inch screen is nothing I need—which leaves its defining factor as that it is the only cell phone/tablet hybrid that can currently access to medical records. The Streak will double as a tablet and a smartphone proving to be beneficial to those patients that need access to their medical records on a frequent basis. E-medical records are the future and in my opinion, Dell is doing a great job of keeping up, working with various health industry vendors to develop a blood pressure cuff using Bluetooth technologies. Uniting a tablet and smartphone hybrid are appealing to both doctors on-the-go as well as patients looking to avoid medical error through history retrieval. Pending reports of kinks and issues with the Streak, I think that this dual operating technology has potential to rule the market of individuals requiring constant access to their files. What do you think about the Dell Streak?

Ever since "meaningful-use" regulations have been defined my inbox has been inundated with articles about it! How important is meaningful-use? Are all the systems going to be certified? What if I have a system already but it's not certified?

These are all great questions! And I'm sure there are more that I am missing...if you can think of any please e-mail them to me: diana@mbsinsure.com. I do research daily to make sure that I am up-to-date with everything going on...

Which is how I stumbled across this article that I thought might be of interest...enjoy!

http://www.ehrbloggers.com/2010/09/is-meaningful-use-important-even-if-i.html

The new CMS rule has some health executive "irked". What rule? The rule saying the multi-campus hospitals that are all under one Medicare provider number are ineligible for the same level of subsidy payments as similar organizations in which each hospital uses it's own Medicare provider number. Each hospital with its own provider number can receive up to 11 million dollars from the government, meaning a Hospital with 5 campuses all working under their own provider number can receive up to 55 million dollars.

So what does this mean for those hospitals that are all under one Medicare provider number? Do they make each campus get their own?

There is another component to the subsidy formula that they need to take into consideration and that is the volume-based component. This rule is based on patient volume and says that the hospital will receive $200 per discharge beginning at 1,150 discharges and will be capped at 23,000.

With all these components to the subsidy payments we can already foresee hospitals having some trouble collecting what is owed to them...

At MBS we are already looking into ways to make this transition an easy one for Hospitals, researching the best ways for them to go about implementing EHR systems so that they can receive the most money.

For more information here is an article on the subject:

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100726/NEWS/100729971/1153

To learn more about the services MBS provides that will make your life easier email me at diana@mbsinsure.com

Till next time,
D

2010
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