Dear Healthcare IT Insider,
It has been a "meaningful" month here in the U.S., with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issuing its final ruling on how physicians and hospitals can implement electronic healthcare IT to achieve meaningful use milestones and receive financial incentives.
For many hospital radiology departments and radiology practices with imaging centers that have deployed RIS and PACS, this represents a cart-before-the-horse analogy. But there is money to be made, and if you haven't already read our article covering the succinct analysis of more than 1,000 pages of documents by staff at the American College of Radiology, click here to do so.
Most exciting is CMS' long-awaited announcement of its proposal to fund a project to analyze the use of decision-support software. This two-year, $10 million project may pave the way for CMS to mandate the use of computerized order-entry systems coupled with decision-support software as part of its stage II or III meaningful use requirements. To participate, you need to apply by September 21. So read all about it!
The articles AuntMinnie.com has published about use of IT systems for quality assurance applications are widely read, especially by members of the Healthcare IT Digital Community -- so in this vein, this issue's Insider Exclusive focuses on a pioneering radiology events and incidents reporting registry in Australia and New Zealand. Click here for all the details.
And on the subject of analyzing databases, click here to learn more about a database patient query tool that extracts useful information from electronic medical records.
