The end of the year presents a prime opportunity to reflect on the challenges and accomplishments of the past 12 months and consider new opportunities for the coming year. When thinking about health information technology (HIT), there are many factors to consider, specifically around trends impacting the industry and how this year’s market shifts will impact our work in 2018.

Starting in 2018, all 57.7 million Medicare beneficiaries will receive new, updated Medicare cards by mail. This means that practices should prepare to update all Medicare patients' policy numbers over the next year.

Your electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management (PM) systems capture a lot of information with every patient encounter. Having technology capable of creating reports and presenting them in a useful way allows you to quickly make key business decisions to improve or maintain peak practice performance in areas from clinical efficiency to financial measures. However, practices that do not take advantage of such solutions may miss out on opportunities or be delayed in making important decisions.

Although the health care reform bill—the American Health Care Act (AHCA)—was withdrawn from consideration in March, President Trump and Congress have continued to make several indications that they will continue to pursue health care reform efforts.

The American Health Care Act has been pulled from consideration, which may cheer up some practices that were concerned about possible changes and ramifications of the bill. However, there are still several other trends in 2017 that will affect practices more immediately than any other health care reform legislation that may happen this year. For practices to truly thrive in 2017 and beyond, providers and practice managers must consider additional trends and address these topics sooner rather than later.

While we are already well into 2017, the health care industry is still being affected by trends and events from last year. These trends from 2016 could pose new challenges for practices, but could also create revenue and patient-volume growth opportunities in 2017 and in the future.

What is Direct Messaging? Direct Messaging is an integrated feature of Nextech, offered by our third-party partner Secure Exchange Solutions (SES). Secure Exchange Solutions is part of the Direct Trust Bundle, which is wrapped up in the MACRA requirements for interoperability. In Stage 2 of Meaningful Use, we saw the introduction of the Health Information Exchange requirement. Modified Stage 2 brought further implementation of the measure, requiring that a patient’s summary of care be sent electronically 10% of the time for all transitions of care, however eligible providers (EP’s) could be excluded if they transitioned less than 100 patients out of their care in the given reporting period. Moving forward under MACRA, the emphasis is no longer on meeting a specific threshold, but rather, encourages eligible clinicians (EC’s) to utilize the functionality for Health Information Exchange as much as possible.

While the implementation of the Quality Payment Program (QPP) within the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) may seem daunting, the program does offer some data capture and reporting relief to practices. MACRA takes elements from three existing Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) programs—the Physician Quality Report System (PQRS), the Electronic Health Record Incentive Program (commonly known as Meaningful Use or MU) and the Value-Based Modifier (VBM)—and consolidates them to one QPP avenue: the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). This means that practices have less overall data to capture, track and report.