Cerner to acquire Siemens for $1.3 billion

It’s official — Cerner will acquire Siemens’ health IT business unit for $1.3 billion. For Cerner, this means a bigger piece of the pie and more opportunity to compete with EHR giants like EPIC. For health care providers using Siemens products, this change will come with some growing pains. It’s likely that Cerner plans to proliferate Cerner Millenium Clinicals across both Invision and MS4 hospitals. It’s still to be seen how Cerner plans to approach Siemens’ health IT customers. It would be in providers’ best interest to get an understanding of how their agreement will transfer to Cerner and what their health IT support options are.

CMS announces preparation and testing plans

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) updated its preparation and testing recommendations after confirming the ICD-10 deadline last Friday.

The deadline is officially October 1, 2015. In order to meet this deadline, CMS has developed a four-part approach that addresses the following areas:

1. CMS Internal Testing
2. Provider Initiated Beta-Testing Tools
3. Acknowledgement Testing
4. End-to-End Testing

For more details on each of these areas, visit the CMS site.

Progress made in Stage 2 attestations

The Meaningful Use / MIPS attestation rates that were published by CMS in July were pretty disappointing. Fortunately, the August attestation update is a bit more promising. As of July, 972 eligible professionals and 10 eligible hospitals had attested to Meaningful Use / MIPS. The latest numbers show an encouraging increase — 1,898 eligible professionals and 78 eligible hospitals have attested to Stage 2.

There’s still a long way to go, but the fact that attestations are increasing at a steady pace is hopeful.