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?

Late yesterday afternoon, the long awaited day finally arrived when CMS officially announced that the proposed rules regarding Meaningful Use, originally announced back in April of this year, are final! The changes do not alter the calculation of the measures so no software update is needed for 2015 attestation reporting. Here's how the latest news from CMS will affect you and your practice.

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).

Way back in 1983, well over 30 years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) began drafting the 10th Edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). It took them just shy of a decade to actually finish the thing, of course, which they finally released in 1992. The transition from ICD-9 did not happen overnight, though… not by a longshot. In fact, it would take a number of years before most countries started using it.