Clinical documentation plays a vital role in delivering quality patient care. However, reliance on faxes and other unstructured documents to support medical information exchange remains a major challenge. This is especially true for providers like nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, and other organizations that have to manually enter medical records into their EHR, or lack […]

For too long, the healthcare industry has focused on how well healthcare organizations can exchange data with one another—not on how easily the data can be digested by the recipient without a significant amount of manual labor.  As an executive focused on healthcare IT strategy and policy, I’m beginning to see a lot of federal […]

How New Proposed Rules Support CMS Goals and the 21st Century Cures Act The healthcare industry is poised to undergo significant changes in 2023 as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sets forth a wave of rulemaking following the implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act. With the passing of this groundbreaking legislation, […]

Pushback around prior authorization trends continues to make headlines, from a federal push to shorten prior authorization response times to a controversial attempt to require authorizations for gastroenterology procedures, a policy that has since been altered. But amid calls for meaningful change, there’s a way health systems can ease this process now, and it involves […]

In late March, a patient with metastatic cancer arrived at a skilled nursing facility, where she, unfortunately, was supposed to be admitted into hospice care. However, the paper-based packet of discharge orders that accompanied her transfer didn’t contain the instructions for hospice care or pain relief. And because this breakdown in information transfer occurred on […]