Can you believe that it’s been three years? Three years since MACRA ended the Sustainable Growth Rate formula for clinician payment and established a quality payment incentive program. The goal: To create a new way to reward eligible clinicians based on performance and health outcomes, rather than volume.

You know, quality over quantity.

In MACRA, there are two ways to participate in the Quality Payment Program – Alternative Payment Models (APMs) and the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). 

Matt Cady, Chief Innovation Officer at Florida’s Adult Medicine of Lake County, says that before his practice began using eClinicalWorks to track patients moving among care settings, they had a system in place: Post-It® Notes and spreadsheets.

In other words, in spite of having the cloud-based eClinicalWorks EHR, when it came to keeping track of patients moving from a hospital setting to home, they were still, in effect, using paper records. Each provider knew what was going on with their patients, but communicating that information to colleagues was cumbersome and time-consuming.

In 1968, Dr. Joel J. Nobel, a surgeon at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital, warned administrators that a hospital defibrillator wasn’t working. That same week, a 4-year-old patient died because of the same device.

When Florida medical practices talk about snowbirds, they aren’t talking ornithology. They are referring to the large subset of patients who spend the winter in the Sunshine State and scoot back North in the spring. Such patients pose one of the thorniest problems in medicine because keeping track of their health — from the specialists they have seen to whatever medications they are taking — can be a real challenge.

What kind of medical practices need an advanced tool for determining patient risk, projecting the likelihood of adverse health events, and processing each patient with the highest possible degree of specificity in coding for reimbursements?

Maximizing their clinical effectiveness while holding down costs is never easy, but for today’s medical practices, one sure guide is to follow the spending. And the evidence points overwhelmingly to one area — chronic medical conditions. 

How training can improve EHR satisfaction

One of the most familiar stories in healthcare IT is chronic dissatisfaction with Electronic Health Records (EHR). Study after study shows more than half of practices aren’t completely happy with their current EHR, although a much smaller number are actively seeking a new system at any given time.

It requires a great product and great training

Beginning in the early 1980s, a transformation of American medicine began that few medical professionals foresaw. And it wasn’t a miracle drug, a research breakthrough, or some dreaded new disease that did it. It was, to put it simply, the computer.