In January, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt announced that Meaningful Use "as it has existed would be effectively over and replaced with something better" in 2016. Now we know how. Today, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a proposed rule for Medicare Access and CHIP Authorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) integration. As a result, Meaningful Use reporting - as it's conducted today - would end as of Jan. 1, 2017.

ICD-10 may be only six months old in the United States, but new codes have already been proposed for October 1, 2016. Previously, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had placed a five-year code freeze on ICD-10 to help ease the healthcare industry into the new code set. Well, that ended in late March. The CDC announced proposed, new ICD-10-CM codes, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced proposed, new ICD-10-PCS codes. In total, approximately 1,943 new ICD-10-CM codes were announced along with 3,651 new ICD-10-PCS codes.

Data breaches are becoming an all too common occurrence in today's society. That could be quite an understatement for the healthcare industry, according to one report. An Internet Security Threat Report conducted by Symantec found that 39 percent of all data breaches in 2015 were within the healthcare industry.

Ransomware is becoming more common and the healthcare industry has recently been a favorite target of hackers. With five ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations in the last month, healthcare organizations need to pay more attention to combatting ransomware.

We’d like to apologize for an advertisement that ran in the print April issue of Glaucoma Today. This advertisement erroneously claimed that we were rated the #1 EMR for Glaucoma Specialists by Black Book in 2016. As clarification, Black Book does not have a category for Glaucoma Specialists and the 2016 Ambulatory EMR rankings have not yet been announced. What this advertisement should have stated is that Nextech was rated the #1 Ophthalmology Vendor in Black Book’s 2015 Ophthalmology Survey.

This has been a crazy month for ransomware attacks and, unfortunately, the vast majority of them have been focused on healthcare facilities and providers. In fact, no less than five healthcare organizations have been hit in just the last 30 days (and those are just the ones we know about because they were actually reported). On March 30, King’s Daughters Health in Madison, Ind. had to shut down their EMR after finding a user file infected with a well-known form of ransomware dubbed “Locky.” Then, on April 4, operations at MedStar Health were brought to a screeching halt by a ransomware attack that locked their EMR and demanded a payment of roughly $19,000 worth of Bitcoin to release the data. MedStar chose not to pay the ransom, instead taking the time to restore their system via backups. However, I would bet dollars to donuts that doing so ended up costing them far more than $19,000 when all was said and done.

In a study conducted by REACH Health, nearly 400 healthcare executives, physicians, nurses and other professionals gave their feedback regarding the impact of telemedicine in their own practices. The REACH Health 2016 U.S. Telemedicine Industry Benchmark Survey found that 62 percent of practices currently utilizing telemedicine believed it was highly successful in improving patient convenience. An additional 36 percent regarded it as "moderately successful."