In Medicare’s 2014 physician fee schedule, the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services outlined several new telehealth services and
service regions that will be reimbursed by the federal government
starting 2014. These changes include new services for mental health
providers. …More
New CPT Codes Approved for Telehealth
In Medicare’s 2014 physician fee schedule, the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services outlined several new telehealth services and
service regions that will be reimbursed by the federal government
starting 2014. These changes include new services for mental health
providers. …More
8 Notes About Changes to EHR Stage 2/Stage 3
CMS and ONC recently
extended Stage 2 of the EHR meaningful use program, delayed the start of
Stage 3 by a year until 2017, and tweaked the EHR certification program.
But the actions aren’t as much of a reprieve to providers as they
might appear; there are tradeoffs. Here’s a look at the changes. HDM ResourcesRead More »
Care Beyond Walls and Wires: Telemedicine Home-Health Monitoring Program is Changing Patient Lives
Care Beyond Walls and Wires, it’s a telemedicine-based, home-health
monitoring program that has significantly improved the health of most
participating patients, while reducing emergency room visits and
hospital admissions and readmissions, and decreasing the length of stay
for those who still require hospitalization. Qualcomm funded the Care Beyond Walls pilot study. When it ended on April 1, 2013, Northern Arizona Healthcare took on the costs of continuing Care Beyond Walls and Wires. More
FDA Regulation of Mobile Health 2013
FDA at last has published its final guidance on mobile medical apps.
Further, the mHealth industry has morphed several times over the last
couple years. Consequently, in this second edition, more than 80 percent
of the content is new. Download here
Not only have I updated the regulatory analysis, but I’m also
covering a few new topics like FDA regulation of pharmaceutical apps. More
Home telehealth helps specialists reach Parkinson’s patients
In a study published this month as an open-access article in the journal Neurology: Clinical Practice,
100 percent of the 55 patients who participated in a virtual house call
with a neurologist said they were likely to recommend telemedicine to a
friend. The researchers, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and
the University of Rochester (N.Y.), found patient satisfaction levels
topping 90 percent for most aspects of remote consultations. More
Meaningful Use Portal Updates in USHIK
The Meaningful Use Portal
in the AHRQ-funded United States Health Information Knowledgebase
(USHIK) has been updated with new functionality. The portal is a
one-stop shop for Meaningful Use Stage 1 and Stage 2 Clinical Quality
Measures, their computation logic, their data elements, and the
vocabularies and codes the data elements may take on.
What is USHIK?
The United States Health Information Knowledgebase (USHIK) is an on-line, publicly accessible registry and repository of healthcare-related data, metadata and standards. USHIK is funded and directed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) with management support in partnership with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). More
Text message interventions work best when they’re tailored
Text
messages have been proven several times to be a positive medium for
improving health outcomes. Text message intervention studies for smoking cessation, medication adherence and weight loss have all come back with positive results.
While all of the studies focused on tailoring messages, the researchers agreed that a good next step for texting studies is a three-way texting system, which is helpful to adding an even more human element to the intervention.
“In other studies that we’ve done we’ve created three-way messages, send out, come back in and receive a tailored message based on your response,” .... “And we found that patients sometimes think that it’s their doctor texting back. So we’ve used it as a communication tool, to really think that they’re being cared about.” More
While all of the studies focused on tailoring messages, the researchers agreed that a good next step for texting studies is a three-way texting system, which is helpful to adding an even more human element to the intervention.
“In other studies that we’ve done we’ve created three-way messages, send out, come back in and receive a tailored message based on your response,” .... “And we found that patients sometimes think that it’s their doctor texting back. So we’ve used it as a communication tool, to really think that they’re being cared about.” More
6 regulatory and procedural hurdles for multistate telemedicine
For the most part, the laws that govern the practice of medicine in the
United States are state laws. One of the few things Federal law does say
is that jurisdiction of those laws is based on the patient’s location,
not the doctor’s. That’s tough news for a mobile health company that
wants to establish any sort of multi-state telemedicine practice,
whether it’s evaluating moles and blemishes via store-and-forward
dermatology or doing virtual video consultations on an iPad. More
EHR Use Boosts Diabetes Care, Federally Funded Project Finds
|
A study by the Western New York Beacon Community finds that the use of electronic health records and other health IT helped improve the care of patients with diabetes and reduce costs. The study was funded through a $16.1 million Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT grant. Buffalo News, FierceHealthIT. More |
The Transparency Tipping Point
Patients are engaged and participate in their care when they can view their medical records.
The Issue:With the increasing use of electronic health records (EHRs), patients have more access to their lab and medical records. What is less often seen by patients, however, are the notes doctors enter in the medical record. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded OpenNotes initiative sought to find out how patients would use and feel about open access to doctors’ notes. Others now are experimenting with OpenNotes and exploring how they might change doctors’ practices. More
AHRQ’s Innovations Exchange Focuses on Mental Health Care in Rural Settings
The latest issue of the AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange
features three innovation profiles describing programs that increased
access and improved mental health care for individuals living in rural
areas. One of the featured profiles
describes a program at the University of Virginia Health System in
Charlottesville, in which psychiatric fellows and residents use
videoconferencing to serve children and adults with mental illness who
live in rural parts of the state. More
Mayo’s iPad study had 98 percent engagement among seniors
“Patient
participation is completely dependent on usability,” Cook said at a
session at the mHealth Summit near Washington, DC. “Healthcare
technology and tools are not meaningful unless they’re integrated with
care plans and expectations, and that’s dependent on delivering
knowledge to patients. Once you have a usable tool, you can help
self-assessment and reporting, data acquisition and aggregation is
meaningful, and clinically meaningful algorithms can impact patient
outcomes.” More
Home Runs in Telemedicine and Telehealth: The Season is Always Right!
The First Telemedicine Service Home Run
MGH in the late 1960s and early 1970s: The first
telemedicine service home run was teleradiology, a component of the
MGH-Logan Airport telemedicine program.Teleradiology had been deployed in Canada, around 1959, and then adopted by the MGH program in 1968.
Home run status was achieved decades later.
Today, teleradiology is quite ubiquitous, sustainable, cost effective, and is regarded by many to be mainstream medicine. Thus, a home run! More
Want to Improve Diabetes Management? Send Texts
Researchers study the effects of text messaging on glycemic control in patients with diabetes in a new study. Text messaging is a practical, cost-effective way to engage and motivate low-income patients with type 2 diabetes to improve their long-term management of the disease... Research has shown that even in poor communities, where costly smart phones are inaccessible, most patients have and use text messaging as a means of communication, making it the ideal platform on which to deliver an effective and automated diabetes management solution.
Source: “Trial to Examine Text Message–Based mHealth in Emergency Department Patients With Diabetes (TExT-MED): A Randomized Controlled Trial” Article in press in Annals of Emergency Medicine http://bit.ly/HScCV
Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Expands Telehealth Coverage
The final Medicare Physician Fee
Schedule for 2014 recently released by CMS expands Medicare coverage for
telehealth services to rural areas defined by the Office of Rural
Health Policy. The American Telemedicine Association called the
telehealth provisions included in the fee schedule "good news." MedPage Today et al.More
Telehealth Innovations & Spotlight
AHRQ :
Videoconferencing Enhances Access to Psychiatric Care for Children and Adults With Mental Illness in Rural Settings 12/4/2013
Videoconferencing Enhances Access to Psychiatric Care for Children and Adults With Mental Illness in Rural Settings 12/4/2013
Psychiatric fellows and residents at the
University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville provide care via
videoconferencing to patients in rural parts of the state who otherwise
would likely not have had access to such care.
New Expert
Commentary
Academic Telepsychiatry Programs Enhance Access for Rural Populations
by Ana Maria Lopez, MD, MPH, FACP, Medical Director, Arizona Telemedicine Program and Professor of Medicine and Pathology, University of Arizona http://www.innovations.ahrq.
Academic Telepsychiatry Programs Enhance Access for Rural Populations
by Ana Maria Lopez, MD, MPH, FACP, Medical Director, Arizona Telemedicine Program and Professor of Medicine and Pathology, University of Arizona http://www.innovations.ahrq.
Changing Behaviors to Improve Health
Do
you want to change your behavior to improve your health? According to
the Fogg Behavior Model, behavior change happens when three
factors—motivation, ability, and triggers—come together at the same
moment. http://rwjf.ws/IGk6e
51 digital health metrics in 2013
95M Americans used mobile for health in 201395M Americans used mobile for health in 2013
Pew: 35 percent of US adults are online diagnosers
Seven in ten doctors have a self-tracking patient
Survey: 31 percent of doctors make Rx decisions from smartphones
Manhattan: 72 percent of physicians have tablets
Survey: 43 percent of doctors use mobiles for clinical purposes
Pew: Caregivers are top digital health users, but only 59 percent find online tools helpful
More
High-tech home care for children
| Children who need complex care can receive it at home |
| Home & Community Programs have experienced an increase in home care volume as medical advances have allowed premature and other medically needy children to survive longer with a better quality of life. Bringing the child home despite needing complex care reduces the risk of nosocomial infection and often is easier on the family than continued hospitalization. Nurse.com |
| READ MORE |
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e-Behaviorial Health
Benefit from new technologies... enable people to have remote access to CBT
