Shefali S. Kulkarni compiled this selection of recently released health policy studies and briefs:
Pediatrics: Disparities In Child Access To Emergency Care For Acute Oral Injury — This study looked at the “impact of insurance status on dental practices’ willingness to schedule an appointment for a child with a symptomatic fractured permanent front tooth.” Six researchers posed as mothers of 10-year-old boys who all had the same injury but different coverage: Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) or private Blue Cross dental insurance. T
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Kansas Health Institute News: Rural Kansas Doc Becomes Perhaps Nation’s First Certified EHR User Dr. Jen Brull, a family practice physician in the tiny western Kansas town of Plainville has become what is thought to be the first physician in Kansas — if not in the country — to be federally certified for using electronic health records. Being certified for “meaningful use” of EHRs by the federal Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology qualifies Brull for up to $44,000 in Medicare-based incentives over five years and $63,750 over six years through Medicaid (Cauthon, 5/3).
Reuters: More physicians are using health IT. “U.S. doctors increasingly are ditching pen and paper and sending prescriptions to pharmacies electronically, lured by up to $27 billion in government funds aimed at speeding the switch to electronic medical records. There are now 200,000 doctors who use e-prescribing, or roughly one in three office-based doctors.” E-prescribing is only one piece of the health IT puzzle doctors must solve to get their share of the funds (Steenhuysen, 9/21).
Chattanooga Times Free Press: Even as many doctors prepare to take the leap, “change never comes easily.”
“Only a handful of U.S.
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David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information technology for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “defended the administration’s new plans against critics who say the watered-down rules miss an opportunity to lower costs and improve patient care,” The Salt Lake Tribune reports.
“The recently released rules dictate what qualifies as ‘meaningful use’ of electronic medical records, the standard providers must adopt to access the billions in grants available to help them go paperless. The standards seek to strike a balance between encouraging the change without expecting too much from health providers,” Blumenthal told Utah health officials. Read more
First, Computerworld reports, “Verizon announced on Wednesday a new cloud-based service offering for healthcare providers that will handle the sharing of patient information electronically between disparate platforms. The new service, called the Verizon Health Information Exchange, consolidates clinical patient data from various providers and translates it into a standardized format that can then be accessed via a secure Web portal” (Mearian, 7/14).
Second, The Washington Post reports, “The Federal Communications Commission will announce at its open meeting Thursday a plan to create a $400 million program that would bring broadband connections to rural healthcare providers.
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