tmccormi wrote on Saturday, October 17, 2015:
From my favorite blog
$15+ Billion of Ongoing Meaningful Use Spending Will Change Nothing
fsgl wrote on Saturday, October 17, 2015:
I think that this AMA webcast is fairly representative of physicians’ assessment of Meaningful Use.
Back in 1989 when we were swamped by billing & posting, we invested in a practice management application. It was expensive but it increased productivity by leaps & bounds. It was totally unnecessary for Washington to offer carrots & sticks to get us to digitize AR’s.
It is mind boggling that a bunch of folks, who never managed a medical office, would mandate best practices for physicians, who spent 12 to 14 years just learning the basics.
CMS & former officials, (Kathleen Sebelius, Newt Gingrich), don’t seem to understand that they do not have the expertise nor experience to meddle.
Primum nocere must be a foreign concept for them. Until great harm has been done, via Patient Portals & e-CQM’s; Washington will continue to think that they know best & little will change.
mdsupport wrote on Sunday, October 18, 2015:
All the marketing about patient participation and improving health outcomes via MU including the vanishing incentives is good stategy to lower effective payments to the providers. We now have physicians jumping through digital hoops to provide much cleaner and free digital input to CMS and other payors. Armies of expert paper handlers at these institutions are replaced by groups of transcribers and scribes - paid by practices without any increased reimbursements. Best luck if any provider tries to maintain complete documentation by themselves.
To make matters worse, this same data can and will be used in coming years to justify lowering of payments due to “inferior service quality”.
fsgl wrote on Monday, October 19, 2015:
Kathleen Sebelius & Louis W. Sullivan (Surgeon General under George H. W. Bush) spoke about technology as a means to make healthcare cheaper & better on the PBS Newhour several months back. Even Steven Stack, M.D. (the moderator in the webcast) has bought into this myth. Physicians & patients alike would be grateful if the quality of healthcare remained the same with a modest increase in cost. There is no such animal as better & cheaper under present conditions.
AMA’s position on medical insurance for the elderly early in the 20th century was to cover only the indigent because covering everyone 65 & older would be cost prohibitive. AMA turned out to be correct. Medicare, signed into law in 1965, ran out of money in 1975.
$5.34 trillion was raised through higher withholding taxes. Congress swore up & down the new funds would be kept in a “lockbox”. The piggybank was raided long ago. Real money had been replaced by a series of recurring IOU’s. The IOU’s sit in a 3 drawer file cabinet in the Bureau of the Public Debt in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Upon maturity of a bond, a federal employee would walk across the hall to photocopy a new IOU to replace the old & then file it back into the file cabinet.
Congress tried belt-tighting measures such as Gramm-Rudman, DRG, RBRVS & SGR. Washington repealed SGR this year because they know very well that no one will accept Medicare with a 21% across the board cut in reimbursement on top of the sequester (a part of Gramm-Rudman).
Cutting benefits would be political suicide for members of Congress. Using Big Data, under the guise of making healthcare better & cheaper, is the present strategy to control runaway costs. I don’t know which is worse; that Washington is ignorant of the huge risks to the American people with the deployment of Big Data or that they don’t care.