CMS proposes surprising changes to 2014 Meaningful Use / MIPS requirements.

Many were relieved this week, when CMS came out with revisions to the 2014 Meaningful Use / MIPS requirements. The new CMS rule, released in pre-publication form on May 20, 2014, allows providers to continue to use 2011 Edition CEHRT or a combination of 2011 Edition and 2014 Edition CEHRT for the EHR reporting periods in CY 2014 (physicians) and FY 2014 (hospitals). Furthermore, the rule recognizes that hospitals who haven’t fully deployed 2014 Edition CEHRT may not be able to certify to the 2014 Stage 1 standards. As a result, CMS has proposed some flexibility in the objectives and measures providers must attest to.

For more details, read our post on the latest changes.

Retail transformation in healthcare changes the way consumers are treated.

In an Information Week article this week, the transition healthcare is making from a B2B business to B2C is explored. Healthcare providers and health-related businesses are having to learn how to adapt to the new environment that realities like health insurance exchanges are driving. To do so, many are developing new plans and processes for how they access and sell to their new market — consumers. Technology is making the transition more palatable and organizations are making changes. Some of these changes are discussed in the article on InformationWeek.com. A few of them include:

• Applying analytics to populations to understand patterns, behaviors, and needs
• Shifting to member-centric models, where the focus is on personalization and custom-tailored experiences
• Enhancing multi-channel capabilities to engage with members in the most member-friendly manner

Big healthcare professionals make the case for big data

Healthcare IT News featured an article this week that showcases several organizations’ and professionals’ thoughts and implementation examples of meaningful healthcare data use. This was a hot topic last week at the 11th annual executive conference on health analytics. Comments made at the conference include those of Patrick McIntyre, the SVP of WellPoint, a health insurer. McIntyre made a case for the power of data — “We use analytics and reporting to create economies of scale for all of the provider communities we work with.” 

Farzad Mostashari, visiting fellow of the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution shared his thoughts, “Most of which determines our outcomes isn’t what happens in our office.” — “One of the things that drove me crazy in medicine is that I never got any feedback.” According to the former national coordinator, “99.999 percent of the time, we have no idea what we get.”

SAS Chief Medical Officer Graham Hughes, MD, agreed with Mostashari, stating, “Ninety-nine percent of patient care takes place outside of traditional care settings,” emphasizing the importance of collecting and analyzing data from patients’ everyday lives to close gaps in care and personalize treatments.

For more on the conference, read the article here.