Last week we held a webinar intended to help with your Meaningful Use process: Troubleshooting Your Meaningful Use Reports. Unsurprisingly, many of you had several questions regarding Meaningful Use as we understand that this can be a complicated process at times. To help make your attestation process easier, we've answered the most frequently asked Meaningful Use questions and have split it up into a four-part series. Our hope is that this can be a resource for your practice moving forward in your Meaningful Use attestation, no matter which stage you're currently at.

The days before October 1 represented a stressful time for many medical practices. Questions of how the ICD-10 transition permeated across the country with many practitioners wondering how the new coding system would affect their respective clinics and impact their revenues. Now, a month after the transition, data has been released that could provide some clear answers to those very questions. Last week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a public statement detailing metrics for Medicare fee-for-service payments throughout the first few weeks of ICD-10.

The stakes for healthcare security have never been higher, yet healthcare organizations and EHR companies struggle to maintain compliance with an ever-increasing number of requirements and regulations — like the upcoming third stage of Meaningful Use.

These days it seems like we are all living in a world ruled by social media, where constantly sharing every little detail of their lives has become the new normal for many people—Facebook status updates, Tweets, Instagram photos and videos of kids, pets, food… you name it. As a result, the use of social media marketing has become a necessity for today’s businesses, both large and small. And healthcare practices are no exception.

Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) posted an FAQ webpage on their site with the aim of clarifying the Public Health Reporting Objective (PHRO) Alternate Exclusions for EPs and hospitals that are attesting to Stage 1 and Stage 2 of Meaningful Use in 2015.

On this blog, we’ve already discussed the immediate “aftermath” of the ICD-10 launch in the United States. Needless to say, it wasn’t nearly as bad as some folks had predicted. Sure, there have been a few annoying problems—mainly caused by a handful of insurance companies who refuse to play by the “grace period” rules that were set down by the CMS. Other than that, however, things have gone rather smoothly so far. In fact, according to metrics compiled and published by Relay Health, things appear to have already begun to normalize since the October 1st ICD-10 deadline (and the month isn’t even over yet).

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.