ARRA Grants
The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act
of 2009 and the HITECH Act allocates $2.1 billion for
distribution by the Department of Health and Human Services
through the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT
(ONCHIT). These funds are intended to help healthcare providers
adopt, implement, and effectively use certified EHR technology
that allows for the electronic exchange of health information
between providers. The act also requires that any E.H.R. system
implemented must prove “meaningful use”. The precise meaning of
“meaningful use is still to be determined but it is believed to
include initiatives such as e-prescribing, e-laboratory
requests, Patient Eligibility and Claims processing.
What this means for the average provider
is that to provide services for Medicare must implement
inter-operable Electronic Health Records (EHR) and other
meaningful use criteria (such as Eligibility and Claims
Processing) by 2015. To assist in this
implementation, the Federal Government is providing up to
$44,000 to each qualifying Health Care Provider in the
While this seems like a
lot of money for implementation, it is our opinion that the cost
of implementation of these initiatives for the average provider
will be much greater as the amount of time and expertise
required to understand each practice’s requirements, select a
solution, implement, adopt to new business processes would be a
full time job for most doctors. In
addition the costs, even with available government grants and
loans, would likely never be recouped any reasonable timeframe.
We believe the solution
lies in the creation of a “Shared Services” provider focused
solution that is designed, controlled and implemented for
providers using proven “best practices” solutions and software.
The solutions allow any provider no matter what their size to
interface with the solution and use proven “best practices”
approaches to implementation. Using industry experts to
implement, eligibility and claims processing is standardized to
reduce initial and ongoing costs. The solution must be
highly configurable, intelligent solution
that supports complex working patterns of providers
across the healthcare spectrum.
EDI
Software
File
Transfer Software
IntegrationTools
Portals
SharedServices EHR
Interoperabilty
HIPAA
QuickStart
WhitePapers