A new era in health care is upon us - and doctors and hospitals that aren't part of it could get smaller reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid.
With deadlines for Meaningful Use stage 2 (MU2) looming, many hospitals and clinics are on a last-minute push to install the technology and processes needed to exchange care summaries (sometimes referred to as CCDs or CCDAs) -- standardized digital documents designed to contain information that would be needed when a patient transitions from one provider or care setting to another. They are also looking to satisfy Public Health reporting objectives (syndromic surveillance, reporting to the Wisconsin Immunization Registry) under MU2.
WISHIN is already working with hundreds of hospitals and physician offices in Wisconsin to enable them to exchange care summaries smoothly with one another. Many of these same organizations are also going to be satisfying public-health reporting requirements through WISHIN.
While the clinical value of care summaries is obvious - patient information is prospectively made available for query, providing instant access for those who are making clinical decisions -- there are strong financial incentives to participate in WISHIN's health information exchange services.
Compliance with MU2 requirements can deliver substantial new revenue to health care organizations in the form of bonus payments under Medicare and Medicaid. Conversely, organizations that do not comply with MU2 face the prospect of penalties under those programs.
Participation in WISHIN also offers the potential to substantially reduce the administrative cost and burden of retrieving and sending patient records. Health information exchange is nothing new - hospitals and clinics routinely send and receive patient information to and from each other. But this process is often extremely time- and labor-intensive, requiring manual retrieval and delivery via fax or postal mail.
By enabling the prospective sharing of electronic patient information and query retrieval by the recipient of the information, health information exchange through WISHIN becomes a standardized, efficient, automated and repeatable process rather than a collection of unique, variable and inefficient manual tasks.
WISHIN will soon launch an ROI (return on investment) calculator on its website to help organizations quantify the savings they can realize by participating in WISHIN. Look for more information in future editions of WISHIN Connections.
