Since President Obama put his healthcare reform into action, providers across the country have been clamoring for Electronic Medical Record systems to meet the meaningful use guidelines and cash in on the incentive money offered – up to $44,000 over the next 4 years for eligible providers. What was overlooked initially was the fact that a stand alone EMR system is great – however the purpose of them was to connect with other records systems. Now that vendors have worked out the initial kinks of most stand alone EMR’s, they are focusing on the ability of EMR systems to connect with one another.
According to HealthcareITnews.com, Informatics Corporation of America (ICA) – a developer of interoperability technology for health information exchange, has launched a free discussion forum for vendors of EMR technologies to test and troubleshoot the interoperability of their programs, ensuring the connection and communication between systems. The forum is aptly named ICAetc.
ICA announced that healthcare IT vendors are invited to join the network. These developers can test with ICA directly or with any other participating vendor of their choosing. ICAetc has a community portal to allow vendors to ask questions, share experiences, and help each other achieve success in interoperability.
The Informatics Corporation of America plans to provide the open environment and installation of CareExchange, an interoperability infrastructure based on XDS document sharing, IHE protocols and the Direct Project.
Current participants in the ICAetc forums include Allscripts, Askesis Development Group, athenahealth, CPSI, eClinicalWorks, eMDs, Meditech, NextGen, Orion and Sage Healthcare Division.
Some medical devices are reused many times in common surgical and diagnostic procedures, and have been for years. They include instruments used in surgery (like clamps and forceps), and endoscopes (like bronchoscopes and colonoscopes) used to visualize areas inside the body.
And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to ensure that they are safely reused.
During the August debt default crisis the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction agreed that should the Super-Committee fail in its quest to rid the country of $1.2 trillion in deficit that Medicare funding would be cut by 2% per year for an entire decade beginning in 2013 – a plan that is now reality since …more
