News 11/12/13

From Caymus: “Re: Patient portals. I know a number of practices who already charge patients to access their portal and have for years. Some actually want to have different charges based on tiered portal service. Note that the portal is often wrapped into other concierge-style options.” CMS agrees with me that it’s not “appropriate” for providers to charge patients a fee to access their portal or online PHR. If patients are willing to pay, however, then good for the providers that are successfully collecting fees. I’ll mention that there was a time I paid about $40 a month for home phone service, $15 a month for AOL so I’d have browser and email access, and $5 for movie rentals at the neighborhood Blockbuster store. Perhaps we should re-visit this fee issue in another year or two and see if there are still patients willing to stick with providers that charge for online record access.

NextGen Healthcare hosts 5,000 attendees at this week’s annual User Group Meeting in Las Vegas. During the opening session on Monday, Nextgen introduced NextGen Share, an interoperability solution based on the Mirth HIE platform that facilitates clinical data exchange and referrals from within the NextGen EHR.

The 11-provider Ocean Eye Institute (NJ) selects SRS EHR.

CMS tells MGMA and other stakeholders it might reconsider performing external, end-to-end ICD-10 testing with physician offices following recent problems with its Healthcare.gov site. Previously CMS has said it would not offer external testing and that it was confident with its current internal testing procedures.

Epic, Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, and NextGen customers represent almost half of all EPs that have attested to Stage 1 MU with a 2014 edition base EHR product. CMS reports that through the end of September 47 percent of all EPs (over 325,000) have attested for MU and been paid $2.4 billion.

Medical Radiologists (OH) deploys RadNet’s eRAD technology for its 14-physician group.

Emdeon reports Q3 results: revenues up nine percent, net loss of $16.2 million vs. $15.2 million.

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