Archive for the tag 'EHR Certification'

Galen Certified™ – The New Standard for Allscripts Enterprise™ Expertise!

In last quarter’s newsletter we were excited to announce our Galen Certified-Enterprise EHR Application Specialist training and certification program. Today we are proud to share the news that this quarter we added another eight employees to this distinguished group!  

During the 7 weeks of training not only are all modules of the Enterprise product discussed in great detail with an added emphasis of clinical relevance, but each student must demonstrate a complete knowledge and understanding of the Certified Workflows. Prior to taking both a written and verbal examination on Enterprise fundamentals, each student must successfully build out an entire Enterprise environment from the ground up!

Please join me in congratulating the following…Galen Certified™ Enterprise EHR Application Specialist!

 

Steven Beaucaire, Consultant

Steven joined Galen on September 11, 2011. He comes with us with over 14 years of healthcare experience. He has extensive experience in project management and business operations as well as in-depth knowledge on how technology and healthcare can work together to ensure patient safety and continuum of care. He has significant knowledge on how ambulatory clinics and acute facilities interact within a healthcare organization. His extensive experience as a manager in both clinical and business settings within a healthcare consortium provides an exceptional perspective on today’s healthcare demands. He looks forward to a long and prosperous career at Galen. Steven currently resides in Lewiston, Maine.


 August Borie, Consultant

August joined Galen in January 2011 as a member of the upgrade team, helping to get clients ready to demonstrate Meaningful Use. He worked as both a Project Manager and Upgrade Consultant on this team, while building his Enterprise EHR application experience. Most recently he is working with a client in Portland, Maine on an upgrade and implementation rollout. August graduated from the University of Vermont in 2010 with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Information Systems.

 


Elise Brault, Associate Consultant

Elise joined Galen in November 2011 as an Associate Consultant and completed Galen’s Certification program in December. Elise graduated from the University of Vermont with a Bachelor’s Degree in Recreation Management. She completed master’s degree coursework in Business Administration at St Michael’s College and also recently completed the Health Information Technology Certificate Program at the Community College of Vermont. Elise brings her diverse background in business, healthcare, and management with her drive for customer service excellence to the Galen team. She looks forward to providing Galen clients with EEHR systems expertise and unsurpassed service.


 Barry Chamberland, Associate Consultant

Barry joined Galen in November 2011, having previous experience as a Software Quality Analyst testing clinical applications and workflows. He has been involved in website development for many years and looks forward to expanding his knowledge and expertise in the Allscripts Enterprise EHR™. Barry lives in Burlington VT, and graduated from the University of Vermont in 2004 with a Bachelors Degree in Recreation Management.

 


Jon Deitch, Associate Consultant

Jon joined Galen Healthcare in November of 2011. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 2009 with a BA in Political Science and English. He enjoys Skiing, Music, World History, and Traveling.

 

 

 

 


Evan Lea, Consultant

Evan joined Galen in May of 2011 as an Implementation Consultant. He graduated in 2009 from The University of Vermont with a degree in Marketing. Since joining Galen, he has quickly come up to speed with the front end and configuration of Enterprise EHR. He has recently been working closely with Catholic Health Initiatives in the Midwest with user support, EHR configuration, and build work as they move towards bringing over 500 clinics live in one integrated system.

 

 


Kyle Paya, Consultant

Kyle came to Galen in 2011 from UVM with a Bachelor’s Degree in business administration with a concentration in entrepreneurship. Kyle has been part of the success of a multi-million dollar company with focus on project management, inventory management, and operations planning. During his tenure at the aforementioned company; he also designed, built, and implemented the company’s first formal inventory management database mainly for the managerial accounting initiative he introduced. Kyle has been a Project Manager on six (6) v11.x to v11.2 upgrades in 2011. He also became a Galen Certified – Enterprise EHR Application Specialist during this time. As 2011 came to a close, he made a transition to consultant on the professional services team and joined the Galen group at Lexington Medical Center. There, he is helping bring sites live on Allscripts EEHR while also working with the hospital group’s upgrade team as they under-go their own v11.2 upgrade.


Chelsea Stovall, Consultant

Chelsea joined Galen in September of 2011 as an Implementation Consultant. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. in Human Biology. Following graduation, she completed a Postbac program at UT Austin in Health Information Technology and received her Health Information Technology Manager and Exchange Specialist certification. She has over a year of experience in EHR training, work flow design, go-live support and EHR customization.

 

 

 


CMS Updates Regarding Meaningful Use

 

CMS released a couple of updates last month regarding Meaningful Use and the EHR incentive program. I wanted to pass this information along to our readers.

In their December 7 update, CMS indicated that “HHS announced its intention to delay the start of Stage 2 meaningful use  for the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs for a period of one year for those first attesting to meaningful use in 2011”.  The reason as such, according to them, is that the current schedule for compliance to Stage 2 could be a challenge for those that attested in 2011. The decision also was in consideration for vendors and practices.

 The CMS update identified some benefits from the proposal:

  • The delay could provide vendors more time to develop their certified technologies for Stage 2
  • The delay could also provide providers more time to implement the new software to meet Stage 2 requirements
  • Expectations remain current so that providers attesting in either 2011 or 2012 begin Stage 2 in 2014
  • And while 2011 has passed, CMS believed this idea would provide added incentive for providers to attest in 2011.

While I am sure there is a group of people out there that is ambitious enough to keep pace for this process, I am certain that we all can stand to benefit from the proposed delay.  The benefits from the added amount of time for both the vendors and practices/providers seem more appealing, in my opinion.

Back on December 1, CMS also announced a new tool to help Eligible Professionals (EPs) through the phases of Meaningful Use.  This tool is an eighty-five (85) page PDF file, dubbed as a “Beginner’s Guide”. This file provides a thorough, interactive walkthrough of Meaningful Use.

Among the items of information provided are:

  • EHR Incentive Program basics
  • How to participate (determining eligibility and registration)
  • Meaningful use and choosing measures
  • Attestation
  • Helpful resources on the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs

Lastly, they also provided a link to their Educational Materials page for the EHR Incentive Program. This link offers an extensive array of files and tools regarding the EHR Incentive Program.  This is definitely a link to bookmark, as well as the guide previously mentioned.

If you haven’t already done so, visit the CMS EHR Incentive Programs webpage and register to receive their email notifications. 

Contact Galen Healthcare Solutions for any additional questions regarding Meaningful Use and Allscripts EnterpriseTM EHR.

Announcing Free Galen EHR and Analytics Webcasts

Galen Healthcare Solutions will be hosting a series of free webcasts covering the Allscripts EHR database and Allscripts Analytics application.

The purpose of the EHR webcasts is to give a detailed view into the underlying database schemas as well as useful queries for the Patient and Order/Results tables. For Analytics we will be covering a basic overview of the Analytics applications as well as detailed examples using Worksheets and Crosstabs. 

These will be structured in a similar format to university courses – the three classes will be at 100 (intro) levels.  The list of the webcasts and their times may be found below.

 

Allscripts EHR – Patient: Overview of the Patient tables as they relate to the Allscripts EHR Database. This course will cover basic concepts related to Patient tables, as well as useful queries, views and general best practice techniques. 

  • Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 2:00pm EST

Allscripts EHR – Order/Results: Overview of the Order/Results tables as they relate to the Allscripts EHR Database. This course will cover basic concepts related to Order/Results tables, as well as useful queries, views and general best practice techniques. 

  • Wednesday July 7th, 2010 at 2:00pm EST

Allscripts Analytics: Overview of the Allscipts Analytics application. This course will cover basic concepts related to general functionality of the Allcripts Analytics applications, including example Worksheet and Crosstab problems as well as general best practice techniques. 

  • Wednesday August 11th, 2010 at 2:00pm EST

To attend, please contact Dave Boerner, Dave.Boerner@galenhealthcare.com . You must be an existing Allscripts Enterprise EHR client to attend.

We also offer training courses and reporting services for the Allscripts Enterprise EHR database, ETL database, Analytics and the ConnectR  database.  Please contact sales@galenhealthcare.com for more information regarding these courses and our reporting services.

Estimated Effort to Exhibit Meaningful Use

There is quite a bit of buzz in the healthcare IT community surrounding the ONCHIT/CMS release of the Meaningful Use Interim Final Rule and the  and the EHR certification requirements. The author of HISTalk kindly spent his New Year’s Eve poring over the documents to provide an excel worksheet summary of the actual criteria and thresholds and the author of the Medical Software Advice blog did a great job of outlining definition, features and measurement with his blog entry.  I thought I would take it a step further and provide some meaningful information to CFOs and PMs by taking a stab at quantifying the effort involved with each measure. First some background information and disclaimers:

  • This estimated effort is based on 50 physician multi-specialty organization.
  • It is intended to give a ballpark of effort involved and the numbers serve as estimates only.
  • It does not necessarily scale linearly with number of providers or specialties.
  • The effort only addresses four categories of effort – implementation, technical, interface and training.
  • Categories of effort not addressed include project management, systems configuration and deployment, networking configuration and deployment, hardware (including desktop) deployment, and helpdesk and on-going support.

The meaningful use matrix with effort broken-out can be found on the Galen Healthcare Solutions Wiki.

Now that we have presented the effort involved, let’s delve into how EHR deployments – specifically  AE-EHR deployements – are typically phased:

Phase I: Base, Document, Scan and Dictate

Description: Provide a baseline level of EHR functionality to all users. Real-time access to physician schedules, transcribed and scanned documents, facilitation of dictation.  Data conversions, Scanned charts and documents, Base Deployment. This approach typically appeals to all providers regardless of technical aptitude and would not require significant workflow changes

Advantages: Clinical information access internal and external to the clinic, reduced level of change for physicians through the use of dictate, realized benefits of decreased errors and re-work.

Interfaces:

  • Registration & Scheduling
    • Real-time inbound registration and scheduling feed from practice management system.
    • Initial bulk-load of existing active patients and appointments
  • Transcription
    • Real-time inbound transcription interface from transcription system.

*Phase II: Rx+, Note, Forms, Results

Description: Add medication management, structured note and results

Advantages: Ability to collect structured information facilitating use of panel queries. Additionally, formulary compliance, and prescription faxing/e-prescribing to pharmacies and ability to capture results as discrete data elements

Interfaces:

  • Results
    • Real-time inbound results interface from lab system.

*Phase III: Order, Charge

Description: Facilitates charge capture and order transmission.

Advantages: Completes the access to centralized patient data and further enhances the quality of care and service to patients.

Interfaces:

  • Orders
    • Real-time outbound order interface to lab system
  • Charge
    • Real-time outbound charge interface to the practice management system.

*Phase II and III can be combined based upon the organization requirements

In conclusion, one of the biggest questions that lingers for me is how the data is to be relayed to the government such that organizations can be evaluated as to whether or not they meet the thresholds to receive the incentives. Custom reporting comes to mind as precedent has been set here, specifically with PQRI and Medicare HCC. Galen Healthcare Solutions certainly can provide custom reporting specific to organizations needs in order to communicate meaningful use. Another solution is Allscripts Clinical Quality Solution powered by TeamPraxis. In the meantime, we wait for the rule to be finalized and anticipate announcement of how the meaningful use data is to be relayed.

If your organization is looking for assistance in exhibiting meaningful use, please contact sales@galenhealthcare.com and visit our website for more information regarding our technical and professional service offerings.