Easing a burden
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| Mary Stevens, editor, CMIO magazine |
Previous requirements didn’t take into account practitioners who provide only telemedicine services to patients; consequently, hospitals apply the credentialing and privileging requirements as if all practitioners were onsite, CMS said. The revised rule makes it the responsibility of the governing body of the hospital providing the telemedicine services to meet the existing requirements with regard to its physicians and practitioners providing telemedicine services.
Simplified credentialing and privileging burden is a start, but groups like the American Telemedicine Association have called for additional changes to expand telemedicine's role in care. Reimbursement is another area that must be addressed, as an article in our May issue describes.
A goal of telemedicine and healthcare reform is to keep patients out of the emergency room. However, more care is being delivered in the ER, on the recommendation of primary care physicians—and this might be an unintended consequence of healthcare reform, the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) has revealed. Eighty percent of emergency physicians said that emergency visits are increasing despite healthcare reform and changes in reimbursement, and almost 97 percent of these visits were referred by primary care physicians, according to an ACEP survey.
On the topic of health information exchange, another component of healthcare reform and the HITECH Act, Rhode Island’s state HIE, currentcare, began acquiring data last month, as Jeff Byers reports in “HIE Chronicles.” Is this the trickle that leads to the flood of information exchanged leading to improved care? One thing is certain: This is not the end of the story. It’s just the beginning.
Also not quite done is CMIO’s Health IT Top Trends Survey, which will be extended by a week. Procrastinators can click here for more information.
Mary Stevens, editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com