By Gabriel Perna, For Healthcare Informatics, October 18, 2012
In a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, four Republican senators expressed concerns over several issues related to the adoption of EHRs through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office for the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC)’s meaningful use program. This comes only a few weeks after House Republicans penned a letter to Sebelius asking for a suspension to the Meaningful Use program until
This letter was not as critical as the House Republicans letter, and focused more on getting answers to various questions on Stage 2 of meaningful use. The senators, Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Pat Roberts (R-Ks.), and John Thume (R-S.D.) asked the relevant staff from CMS and ONC to meet with Senate Finance and Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committees, noting a recent briefing by the government agencies did not give “enough time and opportunity” to cover the final rule.
Some of the questions they asked in the letter came out of various recent media reports. This included asking if EHRs increase or reduce diagnostic tests, inappropriate EHR payments to providers, increased billing of Medicare due to EHRs, and meaningful interoperability. The senators say because Stage 2 of meaningful use directly affects the direction of health information technology in the country, they need a better understanding of these issues to conduct a proper oversight.
The senators asked to meet no later than Oct. 26, 2012.
Interested in learning more about meaningful use, health IT implementation strategies and ACOs? Join Kaiser Permanente and Tenet Healthcare as they discuss during their, “Meaningful Use & ACO’s: Implementing One to Achieve the Other” panel at the upcoming iHT2 Health IT Summit in Beverly Hills taking place at the Intercontinental Los Angeles Century City at Beverly Hills, November 7th and 8th!
Both the House and the Senate should take Dr. Halamka’s offer and let him explain to them was this is all about. They don’t get it. I used to write code and wrote a medical records program and the complexities now are huge…here’s the coin for that:)
“The short order code kitchen burned down a few years ago”
Sadly they have no clue and I assume they might be minimal participants in their own health so we are back to “it’s for those guys over there” again:) That is also one of my old standards but still fits. They dug themselves a deep hole this time. I made several posts as to why they don’t look into using the likes of IBM Watson to help create laws and query the information they need. Reverse the order and have all ask questions and get the “same’ data and then go off to committees, time for a change. Speech recognition would be great too for the lowest common denominator we elect with minimal tech skills so nobody gets left out:)
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2012/10/senate-gop-members-call-for-meeting.html
They should be paying attention to the FDA and getting them funds to do routine inspections as they can’t do it now, not enough money and with the meningitis situation it brings that front stage. I have a great potential solution too with taxing data sellers to create the money and the pool is huge as Walgreens in 2010 make short of $800 million selling data only, so add on banks and other companies..huge and consumers get a federal disclosure page on what kind of data they sell and to who. State servers are already slowing down to a crawl over all the mining bots in there and they don’t update either so some states like North Carolina kicked out companies like CoreLogic.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2012/10/meningitis-fungus-investigation-and.html
If they had their wits about them, the would be working on financial clean up as that’s the root of all of this so watch this documentary that has actual quant talking, which we never get to hear otherwise on how they create their fictitious formulas and they tell you that bank CEOs are not smart enough to understand the math and talk about their business models, i.e. Jamie Dimon not too long ago, perfect example. This is chapter 44 of the Attack of the Killer Algorithms.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.hk/2012/09/quants-alchemists-of-wall-street-video.html
Yes so shame on our digital illiteracy in Washington as they are trying to destroy a good thing is really needed. My GOP guy where I live talks more about his tomato plants than anything else when you visit his office, true story.