FREE Webinar - Become a CureMD MUvement Champion and learn how to earn Meaningful Use Incentives in 2013


Meet the measures! Receive the incentives! Join the MUvement by CureMD!

If you are one of those who still have not adapted to the Meaningful Use program, then look no further!
CureMD is conducting an educational webinar on Thursday, April 11th, 2013.
Join the ‘CureMD MUvement’ and learn about how you can get up to $64,000 in incentives and analyze the impact of Meaningful Use without incurring any penalties Register Today
With the ‘Fast Track MUvement’ program, join hundreds of CureMD providers who have already achieved Meaningful Use objectives and received thousands of dollars in incentives.According to CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), “Meaningful use is the set of standards defined by (CMS) Incentive Programs that governs the use of electronic health records and allows eligible providers and hospitals to earn incentive payments by meeting specific criteria”
There are some required changes for Stage 1 of Meaningful Use in 2013. Providers will have to generate and transmit prescriptions electronically, they should be capable to exchange key clinical information among providers of care and patient authorized entities electronically, and, makes additions to the objective regulation text for three public health measures.
Stage 2 of Meaningful Use program is set to be implemented by October 2014 and will pertain to advance clinical processes. The criteria for stage 2 broadly encompasses more rigorous health information exchange, increased requirements for e-prescribing and incorporating lab results, electronic transmission of patient care summaries across multiple settings and more patient-controlled data.
The primary goal of meaningful use is the promotion and widespread implementation of Electronic Health Records in the U.S so reap the benefits of complete and accurate information, better access to information and patient empowerment.
More and more providers are adopting Electronic Health records and according to a recent study this number is going to exceed 80% of providers by the end of this year. Hospitals and clinics which do not meet the requirements by the year 2015 will have to face penalties. There will be a 1% reduction in Medicare and Medicaid payments, to be increased to 2% in the next year and 3% in the year after that. Therefore, it is significant for providers to start adopting Meaningful Use as soon as possible so that they can receive higher amounts of incentives.
If you are one of those who still have not jumped on the bandwagon, there is an interesting opportunity for you to acclimatize with the details and requirements of Meaningful Use. Register for free MUvementWebinar

Are you ready to implement EMR at your practice



If your practice is trying to get ready and implement EMR then you need to make sure that you have everything ready.
You are not ready to implement EMR if you have issues in communicating with your current EMR vendor.  You need to make sure that there is one specific person in the organization who is overseeing the implementation and hence knows about each and every little detail about the software. Otherwise, putting the responsibility on medical staff will overburden them and will compromise their quality of work at the office.

To get the practice EMR ready, you will need to look at the following things:

1.       Educate every relevant person in the office about the upcoming changes and hold trainings on how to use the integrated software. Provide basic guidelines to the management and how to best use the EMR software.
2.       Ask questions from the vendor about every issue that you are facing with the software and how they think the issue should be resolved. Put in place a single person who will coordinate with the vendors and solve issues at the workplace.
3.       Make sure that you try out a testing phase of the EMR software before it is actually supposed to go live at the practice. Initiate the use of EMR throughout the office a couple of months before the actual starting date so that every issue that comes with the running of the software is handled before and everyone gets to learn how to use the software on a daily basis.
4.       Take control of your previous problems caused by paper-based records. Analyze why there was a problem in the first place and how the implementation of EMR is going to solve these problems.
5.       You have to make sure that there is financial stability at the workplace because the implementation of EMR can cost a lot in the implementation phase. If the practice is running behind on meeting up with the expenses incurred on the software implementation then take a step back and wait for the situation to ameliorate.

The implementation of an EMR software takes some time so the practice should be diligent and should start working on it as soon as possible. Getting late in the implementation process can cause havoc at the practice where everybody already has a lot of workload to look after.