News 6/26/12

The Office of Inspector General finds that 57% of Medicare physicians used an EMR in 2011; 75% of those EMRs were certified to document E/M services. Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, and GE Healthcare were the vendors most widely used by physicians for documenting E/M services.

Gateway EDI completes it purchase of RCM provider National Healthcare Exchange Services (NHXS) for more than $8 million.

Physicians say their biggest practice management challenges are administrative tasks tied to payers and and integrating EMR. The same survey found that only 39% of physicians believe EMRs will improve care, while 34% say it will cause care to deteriorate.

Health Nuts Media launches a Spanish-language version of its animated asthma education series Huff & Puff: An Asthma Tale. Health Nuts Media uses digital media to communicate health issues and HIStalk Practice’s own Dr. Gregg Alexander is the company’s chief medical officer.

EMR/PM provider Cloud-MDs acquires Doctors Network of America, a physician billing and consulting firm.

ChartLogic names Brenner Adams SVP of business development. Most recently Adams was director of business development for Microsoft’s X-Box Games Studio.

Humana is named the top payer among US health insurers in athenahealth’s PayerView Rankings, which measure the financial and administration performance of health insurers, as well as their transaction efficacy. For the first time since 2008, Payerview metrics dipped slightly from the previous year, likely due to disruptions associated with the ANSI 5010 transition.

Hackensack University Medical Center (NJ) expands it billing service contract with SPi Healthcare to include 300 providers in 55 practices.

Wayne County Health Clinic (IN) selects iSALUS Healthcare’s OfficeEMR solution.

Reminder: eligible providers and group practices participating in CMS’s eRx Group Practice Reporting Option must report on a minimum of 10 e-prescribing events before June 30, 2012 in order to avoid a 1.5% payment reduction on their 2013 Medicare Part B services.

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Physicians at 2,600 hospitals linked in new health care database
The project by the Premier alliance is part of wider efforts to get doctors to use EHR data to identify ways to improve medical practice.
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