The following is an excerpt from an article that appeared on Modern Healthcare. It was written by Joseph Conn. Hospitals are further along in upgrading their electronic health-record systems to where they need to be than had seemed possible only a month ago, according to new data from the CMS. After getting off to a sputtering start, nearly 3,700 hospitals have attested to meeting the program's meaningful-use requirements through Dec. 1 this year. More are expected to attest as the filing period draws to a close at the end of this month, Elisabeth Myers, of CMS' office of e-health standards and services, said in a report to the federally chartered Health Information Technology Policy Committee.

If you’re not maximizing the number of patients you can see every day as well as the number of referrals that your facility sees on a regular basis, you are doing a disservice to your radiological practice. Taking advantage of the latest developments in software solutions will definitely help a health services provider work more efficiently. Many medical practices use electronic health record software to keep track of their patient’s clinical and medical details and to interact with insurance entities more effectively. However, standard EHR applications are not the most suitable approach when you have a specialty to support. Read on for details about how radiology-specific software can maximize your revenue and keep referrers referring patients to your practice.

How many beds are currently occupied at your inpatient facility? Which ones have patients that are due to be released soon? Can you determine which programs are using more beds? The ebb and flow of patients staying at your facility by its very nature must be somewhat unpredictable. When you have hard data on the status of each bed, you’ll be able to manage your resources much more effectively.

Computer systems capable of understanding human speech have become part of the fabric of our everyday life. People routinely speak to disembodied electronic assistants, such as when calling a customer help line or to check the balance on an account. We also speak to our smartphones, using them to look up information or to dictate a note. With robust speech recognition in place, we can get our jobs done faster and with fewer errors, leaving us free to devote more time to our core responsibilities.

One of the most important aspects of working as a manager or owner of a medical practice is to monitor changes in the industry for examples of ways to cut down on costs, with an eye toward minimizing wasted effort and avoiding redundancy. If members of your medical organization are entering the same information about patients and details about each encounter into your system on a regular basis, this is a big waste of time and resources that you will want to address as soon as possible. The task of entering codes into the system has traditionally been one of drudgery and monotony, often making it fraught with human error. This typically occurs because someone on staff has to manually input the codes into the system from a paper Superbill that was completed by the doctor during the encounter.

By now, most members of the medical industry are aware of the government’s requirement that we switch over to ICD-10 from International Classification of Diseases code version 9. The deadline has been extended once more, and we must all be ready for the October 1, 2015 transition. There is so much information out there now on what’s needed for ICD-10 readiness, and you likely have seen many of details being publicized. Much of the information does not require your attention any more as long as your practice has the two things that are needed most: a solid, reliable, easy-to-use ICD-10 code converter and a built-in claim denial manager.

The following is an excerpt from an article from Diabetes News Journal. It was written by Leonor Mateus Ferreira. There are still a significant number of people in the United States suffering from diabetes that are undiagnosed according to a collaborative study between researchers in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom, and recently published at the CMAJ Open journal. The research concluded that performing electronic health record (EHR) data analysis in patients may help determine undiagnosed diabetes, as it reduces both the time and the costs spent in identifying risk individuals.

You are probably aware that many of your competitors in healthcare have begun using electronic health record software to streamline their work. What you may not have realized is that EHR software can do much more than improve efficiencies or save your practice money. With digital information for each patient kept securely stored and easily accessible when medical professionals need it the most, EHR systems will improve patient care. Here are three ways that electronic health records keep patients safe.

The following excerpt is from an article from Midsize Insider. It was written by Marissa Tejada. Electronic health records (EHR) are predicted to offer savings in the tens of billions to the worldwide health care industry, changing health care in the process. As industries move full force into the Internet of Things (IoT), midsize firms in any industry can be poised to innovate and gain productivity.

Hospital administrators are always on the lookout for methods to run their facilities more efficiently and improve the care they provide to each patient. One of the leading indicators of how well a hospital is doing its core tasks is the rate of readmission. Discharging patients at the appropriate time and ensuring that they are only sent home with the proper support in place for recovery are important issues that administrators strive to address. Here are four ways hospitals can reduce readmission rates using electronic health record software.