Cerner announced a deal to acquire
long-term care IT company Resource
Systems.
Pediatric Alliance, a group medical practice in Pennsylvania, has selected data
location and management services
from Ascent Data.
MDeverywhere, a physician revenue cycle management vendor, has acquired
Advanced Health Management Services,
which offers practice management and
credentialing services.
Elsevier has acquired Fisterra.com, an
online Spanish-language clinical reference publisher.
MEDSEEK will acquire Third Wave Research
Group, a provider of predictive analysis
tools for healthcare applications.
Meaningful Use Attestation Begins
Stage 1 of the federal government’s
meaningful use incentive program officially opened for business April 18,
allowing eligible physicians and hospitals to attest that they met the EHR
specifications and certification criteria necessary to receive thousands of
dollars in incentive compensation.
Through the online Medicare and
Medicaid EHR Incentive Program
Registration and Attestation System,
providers fill in numerators and denominators for the meaningful use
objectives and clinical quality measures, indicate if they qualify for exclusions to specific objectives, and
legally attest that they have successfully demonstrated meaningful use
during a 90-day period.
Those who pass the attestation review can receive as much as $44,000
through the Medicare program or
$65,000 under the Medicaid program.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had not yet released
the number of providers and facilities
who have attested through the program at press time. CMS expected
to report on the number of successful
attestations and incentive payments
in late May, according to CMS press
officer Joseph Kuchler.
“A number of eligible professionals
and eligible hospitals have already
submitted attestation information
that shows they are meaningfully using their certified EHR technology,”
Kuchler said.
Emdeon, a vendor of claims and revenue cycle management systems, will
acquire EquiClaim, a payer audit and
recovery services provider.
West Virginia-based Camden-Clark Medical Center, Hannibal Regional Healthcare
System in Missouri and Lakeway Regional
Medical Center in Texas will roll out clinical, revenue cycle, and performance
management applications from
Allscripts.
Healthcare consulting company Arcadia
Solutions will acquire health IT services
firm Concordant.
Waud Capital Partners will acquire Revenue
Cycle Solutions, a vendor of revenue
cycle applications for hospitals and
group practices.
PerkinElmer, a provider of software
applications for medical analysis, has
acquired genetic analysis and laboratory workflow systems maker Geospiza.
Outpatient imaging provider Center for
Diagnostic Imaging has selected a radiology information system from Merge
Healthcare.
Harvard Medical School and Brigham &
Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts have
picked business analytics technology for prescription drugs and safety
management from IBM.¢
3,000 Health IT Grads Expected by Fall
In April the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT estimated that
3,000 health IT professionals would
graduate from the Community College
Consortia to Educate Health IT Professionals program by the end of summer.
Approximately 2,280 graduates were
expected to graduate in April.
The graduates are part of a broader
ONC workforce development program
that includes university-based training,
health IT competency exams, and the
development of a health IT curriculum
for use in institutions of higher education.
The training provides graduates with
the knowledge to work with providers
and hospitals to adopt and achieve
meaningful use of electronic health records. The new professionals will also
be trained to work with EHR vendors
to implement EHR systems in provider
and hospital settings.
According to ONC many graduates
are mid-career professionals with prior
backgrounds in healthcare or IT.
“Training the professionals to sup-
port the growing health IT industry is
a critical step toward ensuring that
health care providers large and small
are successful in their adoption and
meaningful use of health IT,” said Far-
zad Mostashari, national coordinator
for health IT, in the e-mail announce-
ment. “The workforce development
programs represent a comprehensive
approach to addressing the needs of
the entire health care industry. The
programs are designed to deliver high-
ly qualified professionals who are pro-
ficient in every level of the health care
delivery system.”
The American Recovery and Rein-
vestment Act appropriated $2 billion
for health IT programs, including work-
force development programs intended
to address a need for 50,000 more
health IT professionals nationwide.
The program consists of five regional
groups with 82 member community
colleges. Member colleges received
grants to develop or improve nonde-
gree health IT programs that could be
completed in six months or less.
ONC says the consortia is on target
to graduate 7,000 health IT workers by
year-end and will aim for 10,500 graduates in 2012. ¢
