When your EHR is no longer available to retrieve the data that allows your clinicians to provide the best and safest care for your patients, what do you do?  We have become so dependent at having data at our fingertips that when it stops working or we have to wait for it, we grow impatient, it creates chaos, and we find other avenues to retrieve the data. Quality of care and safety for our patients is the number one priority in healthcare. 

CMS recently published the FY 2024 Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Proposed Rule which includes several proposed changes to the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) Program and Medicare Promoting Interoperability (PI) Program for eligible hospitals (EHs) and critical access hospitals (CAHs). For the full text of the rule, see the Federal Register.

CMS recently published the FY 2024 Inpatient Psychiatric Facilities Prospective Payment System (IPF PPS) Proposed Rule which proposed changes to the Inpatient Psychiatric Facility Quality Reporting (IPFQR) program. All IPFs, which include psychiatric hospitals and psychiatric units of an acute care hospital or critical access hospital, paid under the IPF PPS must meet IPFQR reporting requirements. For the full text of the proposed rule, see the Federal Register.

Effective January 1, 2023, new and revised requirements to reduce health care disparities will apply to organizations in the Joint Commission’s ambulatory health care, behavioral health care and human services, critical access hospitals, and hospital accreditation programs. 

What are the differences between Hospice and Palliative care?

In our previous Power BI blogs, we’ve introduced the Power BI platform and described why it’s such a great tool for developing custom business and clinical analytics reports for MEDITECH Data Repository. In this blog, we’ll discuss a vitally important concept at the heart of all Power BI report development: the data model.

Downtime Defender is Acmeware's downtime reporting solution for the MEDITECH EHR. To learn more, read the case study from Anderson Hospital, who use Downtime Defender as their continuity of care solution. 

CMS recently released the CY 2023 OPPS Final Rule, which included updates to the Hospital Outpatient Quality Reporting Program (OQR) Program. For the full text of the rule, see the Federal Register.

CMS recently published the CY 2023 Quality Payment Program (QPP) Final Rule which included numerous updates to MIPS Value Pathways (MVPs) and Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). For the full text of the rule, see the Federal Register.

As a healthcare professional with many years of nursing experience, I can’t say that there is ever a good time for a hospital’s EHR system to be offline. Whether the system is having routine maintenance or if there is another event that interrupts its access and use, the impact is never a positive one. Every healthcare provider working in the facility during that downtime period will be affected. 

Working with data these days seems to be all about metrics, measurements, and numbers. Healthcare data of course is no exception, just think of the many different contexts of numeric values possible in the MEDITECH EHR: lab test results, patient counts, drug dosages, account balances and budgets – the list is long. Fortunately, SQL Server gives us some tools to work with and manipulate numeric values to the sometimes very precise formats we need in a clinical context.

I often find myself having the same conversation with folks about the health of the data in MEDITECH’S Data Repository (DR).  I remind them that if they use the DR for reporting, but don’t have a process to maintain data health and accuracy, then they shouldn’t be using DR. Keeping DR data healthy is easy, it’s just a matter of knowing what to do and when to do it.