In a new study from the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), it appears patients are being offered access to their electronic medical records and increasingly choosing to check them as well. The new numbers from 2014 report that approximately 40 percent of patients were offered access and nearly half of those patients eventually followed through on checking their EMRs. Just one year ago, only 28 percent of patients were offered access to their EMR and a slight less amount of patients -- 46 percent -- actually accessed them.

We've reached the two-week milestone for ICD-10. How's your practice doing? There's little doubt that' you've experienced some stress, no matter how prepared your practice may have been. Transitioning to ICD-10 is no small feat and we realize that many of you are still navigating your way through the ICD-10 transition, armed with plenty of questions. To help prepare our clients, we've posted a lot over the last several months about ICD-10, but just because the deadline has passed doesn't mean many of those questions have disappeared.

All this talk about EHR adoption, but consumers and patients aren't missing out on using healthcare technology either. According to a report from The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, 22 percent of consumers used technology to access, store and transmit health records in the last year, up from 13 percent in 2013. Additionally, 32 percent of those with chronic conditions were utilizing healthcare technology, representing an increase from 19 percent in 2013.

As EHR technology progresses, a greater emphasis has been placed on nationwide interoperability between vendors in order to take full advantage of patients' electronic health information. Last week, ONC released its final interoperability report, "Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap." In the roadmap, ONC laid out three high-level goals for health IT interoperability to help ensure they achieve a "learning health system by 2024.

Specialty physicians are one week in to the ICD-10 era. Yes, the long-awaited ICD-10 deadline has come and gone. How is everyone feeling? For many, the transition represented large amounts of stress and frustration due to either the sheer size of ICD-10, unpreparedness or even both. So how can you best attack the ICD-10 transition, even when the deadline has already passed?

The official U.S. launch of ICD-10 has come and gone. Some folks were happy to see this finally happen, while others were pretty angry that it was not further delayed. Love it or hate it, I think there is one thing everyone can agree on -- among the 68,000+ billing codes in ICD-10, there are some pretty weird (and hilarious) things to be found. In this article, we’re going to have a bit of fun by looking at what I consider to be the top ten oddest and most hilarious billing codes in ICD-10.

According to EHR Software BuyerView 2015, a survey conducted by Software Advice, the number of physicians switching EHR systems has grown exponentially over the past year. Since 2010, the majority of physicians (63 percent) purchasing EHRs were looking to replace paper systems, mainly due to government regulations. However, that trend has been reversed now as approximately 60 percent of EHR buyers are already using EHRs.

If, like me, you spent way too much time searching “ICD-10 Launch” on the internet yesterday… you probably (also like me) saw a lot of panic-inciting and/or fear-inducing blogs and opinion articles that made it sound as if yesterday’s transition to ICD-10 in the United States was going to be the medical coding equivalent of the apocalypse. Today, I am happy to report that the U.S. ICD-10 transition has been about as “apocalyptic” as the Y2K panic was back in 2000 (which, as most of you probably remember, was not an apocalypse).