Group Practices

According to Dr. Sara Czaja, co-director of the University of Miami’s (UM’s) Center on Aging, and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, an estimated 22 million family members provide at-home care for disabled and ill relatives. Twenty percent of these caregivers provide care for family members who have dementia. Many of the caregivers also suffer from ill health, self-neglect, a sense of isolation and depression, she says.

Olathe Medical Center overcomes technical, political and organizational hurdles to deploy one of the nation’s first integrated radiology and cardiology PACS.

Many healthcare organizations advocate bringing cardiology and radiology image-management functions together, but the technology and challenges can be daunting. Olathe Medical Center was no different, but in the face of these obstacles, this Kansas community medical center had a vision of including each patient’s images in a single patient jacket – one reliable image-management solution easily accessible from any PC, whenever required for patient care.

Mike Soler, IT systems and support manager for Florida’s Intercoastal Medical Group (IMG), says his organization has already transitioned to paperless operations. His group serves the residents of Florida’s Sarasota and Manatee counties with six locations specializing in everything from neurology to orthopedics, family practice to internal medicine, and gynecology to cardiology. The group also operates a weekend clinic at its Hyde Park, Fla., location for patients unable to wait for acute, non-emergency medical care from their regular physicians.

IMG handles 85,000 lab tests, studies 80,000 images and logs more than 255,000 patient visits in a given year. The clinics needed a system robust enough to reduce errors and ensure excellent care.

HCIT Adoption To Spike

By Rose Crane, CEO, Epocrates

The question is no longer whether physicians will adopt healthcare information technology (HIT), but when and to what extent.

In fact, adoption should escalate in 2010 as the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) policy and standards committees define meaningful use, and its impact on the qualified, reimbursed purchasing decisions for many large practices ready to take the leap.

Approaches to finding a single vendor to provide an all-in-one solution.

Group practice filing areas often are brimming with patient charts, explanation of benefits, HIPAA forms and all the other documentation associated with such practices. The vision of a totally digital healthcare system is on the horizon for most medical groups, but today’s patient charts are often unwieldy and cumbersome. Lost charts and patient privacy are an increasing concern as HIPAA compliance requires proper security and authorization of all paperwork.

A university medical center implements a new communications system for rapid delivery of critical information.

Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center (VCU Medical Center) operates more than 200 specialty areas. The center’s level 1 trauma center has 779 beds and performs as many as 340,000 procedures annually, ranging from plain film radiography to CT and complex interventional procedures.

A new PM system gives this cardio group a good workout, enabling rapid growth and enhancing cash flow.

Several years ago, Leesburg, Fla.-based Heart and Vascular Multispecialty Group faced an unusual challenge. Our practice — one of the leading cardiovascular groups in the Southeast and founded by internationally-recognized interventional cardiologist David C. Lew, M.D., — was outgrowing facilities almost as quickly as we were building them. Our practice had a vision of expanding to include resources such as a catheterization lab, echocardiography and nuclear medicine, all of which are often only available in hospital settings. But our leadership could not have anticipated how rapidly the organization would grow.

Implementing e-prescribing with grant support and MIPPA incentives enables this health system to provide the highest possible quality of care.

In Feb. 16, 2009, Heritage Valley Health System announced that we had received a $661,500 grant from the $29 million Highmark Health Information Technology Grant Program, an affiliated unit of Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield. The Highmark grants are designed to help physicians acquire electronic prescribing (e-prescribing)technology, part of a larger move to encourage adoption of electronic health records (EHR).