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The annual HIMSS conference has become the industry’s Super Bowl and Daytona 500, a festive occasion filled with serious discussions and far-reaching ideas. Set it in Las Vegas and it only magnifies the robustness. This month’s E-Newsletter includes a recap of a session cohosted by one of the more penetrating personalities present at HIT’s biggest show. — Lee DeOrio, editor Billing and Coding: Reduce Friction in the Revenue Cycle By Tom Herald The consumer-driven health care era has transformed the role of the patient. Today, patients are more informed about their treatment options and what they will have to pay out of pocket. Driven by a desire to obtain affordable health care, patients seek providers that align with their overall needs without compromising care. The evolution of the health care business model corresponds to the development of the payment process. What once was a business-to-business transaction has been replaced by something more complex and difficult to navigate: a business-to-business-to-consumer model. In a business-to-business model, a medical practice would file a claim to the insurance company, which would then adjudicate the claim and pay the practice for services rendered. In the business-to-business-to-consumer payment model, physicians send the insurance company a bill to adjudicate. The insurance company may well notify the physician that the patient owes a deductible, which the physician would then bill to the patient. After billing the patient for the deductible, the physician has to get that payment adjudicated by the insurance company and only then can the physician bill the patient and collect for the services rendered. Full Story »   E-News Exclusive Patient Matching: The Saga Continues Opportunities, Challenges Mark eCQM Debut Education Initiatives Keep Pace With the Dynamic HIT Landscape The Human Errors Behind Data Breaches Losing Software Bidder Says University of Illinois Is About to Make a $100M Mistake Most Patients Comfortable With Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Questions, Research Finds HIMSS Recap AAPC Preview Industry Insight Tech & Tools Patient Matching: The Saga Continues There's more to an effective duplicate record strategy than implementing the latest technology. Read more » Opportunities, Challenges Mark eCQM Debut Several issues, including how to avoid clinician burden while collecting vast amounts of data, have emerged as stumbling blocks as electronic clinical quality measures gather steam. Read more » Education Initiatives Keep Pace With the Dynamic HIT Landscape There's never been a better time for those with an itch to learn to capitalize upon the numerous opportunities offered by various organizations. Read more » The Human Errors Behind Data Breaches The industry may like to point fingers at failed technology and the wherewithal of determined hackers but it's often people who foul up security efforts. Read more »

Losing Software Bidder Says University of Illinois Is About to Make a $100M Mistake Cerner is taking exception to the fact that The University of Illinois Hospitals has awarded its EHR contract to Epic, reports NBC Chicago. Most Patients Comfortable With Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Questions, Research Finds Mayo Clinic research found 97% of patients are comfortable with their health care provider asking questions about sexual orientation and gender identity, dispelling concerns that these questions would offend patients. In Defense of Precision Medicine By Lee DeOrio Like any profession, HIT has its stable of well-known names and dynamic personalities who have become de facto industry spokespeople. Among the most engaging is John Halamka, MD, chief information officer of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Halamka, along with copresenter Paul Cerrato, a medical journalist, hosted a presentation exploring the hype surrounding precision medicine. Is the movement a game-changer? Halamka and Cerrato believe so. First, Cerrato debunked four objections to precision medicine: high costs, a lack of interoperability, it's already being practiced, and few clinical benefits. He agreed current medicine is personalized—up to a point. Machine learning is poised to base care on a collective experience and offer an unbiased perspective, he said. Read more » Get the Most Out of HEALTHCON 2018 By Heather Hogstrom AAPC’s HEALTHCON will be held April 8–11 at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando, Florida. Conference attendees can take advantage of discounted theme park tickets and plan an evening with colleagues at Epcot, Magic Kingdom, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, or Disney’s Hollywood Studios, or cool off at one of Disney’s water parks. Billed as the largest revenue cycle management event of the year, HEALTHCON offers more than 90 educational sessions. A new tool called the HEALTHCON Experience Planner can quickly and easily help attendees narrow down what they might be most interested in focusing on at the conference. The tool suggests sessions and events based on the user’s answers to four questions. Read more » Apple Adds Medical Records to Its Health App Apple has introduced a significant update to the Health app with the iOS 11.3 beta, debuting a feature for customers to see their medical records right on their iPhone. The updated Health Records section within the Health app brings together hospitals, clinics, and the existing Health app to make it easy for consumers to see their available medical data from multiple providers whenever they choose. Now, consumers will have medical information from various institutions organized into one view covering allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures, and vitals, and will receive notifications when their data are updated. Health Records data are encrypted and protected with the user’s iPhone passcode. The new Health Records section currently is available to the patients of a dozen medical institutions as part of the iOS 11.3 beta. In the coming months, more medical facilities will connect to Health Records offering their patients access to this feature. Learn more » Zynx Health Debuts Enhanced Knowledge Analyzer Zynx Health showcased the latest release of Knowledge Analyzer at HIMSS18. Originally created in 2014, Knowledge Analyzer is a revolutionary content management solution that enables clients to control and validate content (eg, order sets, care plans, policies) within their EHR, identify and close knowledge gaps, create rules and alerts via checklists, maintain a single source of truth, avoid duplicate work, and prevent errors—all without requiring a system build or integration. Now in its third generation, Knowledge Analyzer's recent enhancements include 433 additional interventions, new checklists for pain and syncope, and an improved user dashboard. Knowledge Analyzer now also includes vital interventions (key clinical processes), natural-language processing, and AI technology to enable the comparison of content from multiple sources. Learn more »   NoteSwift Partners With athenahealth NoteSwift, Inc, a provider of EHR virtual assistant solutions, announces a partnership with athenahealth. As part of the athenahealth Marketplace, a newly integrated EHR virtual assistant, known as Samantha, is now available to athenahealth’s network of more than 106,000 health care providers to help physicians reduce EHR documentation time while increasing reporting accuracy. “NoteSwift is excited to partner with athenahealth to disrupt the EHR market, removing administrative burdens that cause physician burnout and decrease patient interactions,” says Wayne Crandall, president and CEO of NoteSwift. “Our revolutionary new EHR virtual assistant, Samantha, saves physicians six to eight hours each week by eliminating the need to manually enter details of the patient encounter. Instead, Samantha’s advanced artificial intelligence creates the entire patient note from a single screen and with just a few clicks. A physician simply types or dictates the patient narrative and Samantha’s patent-pending technology intelligently parses the text, identifies structured data elements, assigns all required coding, and prepares orders and ePrescriptions for physician sign-off. Samantha then places all the information into the correct fields of athenaClinicals EHR automatically—just as if it had been typed in manually.” — Source: NoteSwift, Inc A Secure, Anonymous Résumé Bank Job Alerts Sent to Your E-mail For The Record offers many flexible advertising programs designed to maximize your results. From print advertising to e-newsletter sponsorships, website advertising to custom e-mail marketing, For The Record helps maximize your investment. E-mail our experienced account executives today for more information or call 800-278-4400! Coming up in our April issue is our Spring Showcase. Contact sales for more information. AlliedHealthCareers.com is the premier online resource to recruit HIM professionals. 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