EHR Vendors Say Virtual EHR Implementations to Last; Orgs Turn to Video Games for COVID Brain Fog

April 08, 2021 - Just over a year after the first COVID-19 peak began, healthcare organizations are finally working out the technology best practices that got them through the pandemic and will carry them beyond it. Meanwhile, CMS dropped some new payment rules while health IT security experts adjusted to the new 21st Century Cures Act information blocking rules.

Virtual EHR Implementations to Last Post-Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a number of industries to go remote, including the health IT and EHR businesses. But as hospitals still clamored to get the technology updates and installations they needed, EHR vendors needed to pivot.

Remote EHR implementations, which leveraged virtual communication channels between vendor and healthcare organization, become commonplace and ultimately evolved into hybrid remote EHR implementations. These projects were successful, organizations that participated report, and some EHR vendors think remote implementations will stick around post-COVID.

“We'll continue to look for opportunities to do things like this in our market to the advantage of our clients,” Mitchell Clark, president of Cerner CommunityWorks, said in an interview with EHRIntelligence. “It's something good that actually came out of this horrible pandemic. It showed that when your back's up against the wall, you can do some things that you didn't think you could do because you had always done it one way.” READ MORE

Health Systems Tap Video Games for COVID-19 “Brain Fog”

An effort from Weill Cornell Medicine, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Vanderbilt University Medical Center will leverage video game technology from Akili Interactive to address the brain fog associated with post-coronavirus side effects.

Akili Interactive has experience with these types of video games, using the concepts to create mHealth tools as part of autism or ADHD care management.

“The chronic symptoms of COVID-19 long haulers represent a serious and growing public health concern that will linger long after the acute nature of COVID-19 has passed,” added James Jackson, PsyD, assistant director of The ICU Recovery Center at Vanderbilt and lead psychologist for the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship (CIBS) Center at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “We’re excited by the potential of new therapeutics that target cognitive impairments to help COVID-19 survivors.” READ MORE

CMS Drops Inpatient Rehab Payment Rules

CMS has released the Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility (IRF) Prospective Payment System and the Psychiatric Facility Prospective Payment System for fiscal year 2022.

The IRF Prospective Payment System for fiscal year 2022 would increase Medicare payments by 1.8 percent, or $160 million.

The agency also made some changes to the IRF Quality Reporting Program final rule that would create assurances that IRF facilities are prepared to care for patients during public health crises like the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, the rule would call on IRF facilities to ensure staff vaccination and efforts to reduce disease transmission. READ MORE

AMA: Payers Reinstated Prior Authorization Protocol During COVID-19

New survey data from the American Medical Association (AMA) showed that most doctors encountered stringent prior authorization rules even after payers said they would relax those rules during the pandemic. Most doctors reported encountering those rules in late 2020, during what many call the beginning of the pandemic’s third wave.

Doctors also reported that prior authorization rules resulted in patient care access delays and organization burden. READ MORE

Maternal Health Patient Safety Still Lagging

New data from The Leapfrog Group showed that certain patient safety metrics in maternal health are still lagging behind. Specifically, rates of C-section deliveries are still higher than optimal, with the average hospital C-section rate coming in at just under a quarter of all births.

Organizations are making progress in early elective deliveries, the data showed.

Right now, The Leapfrog Group’s data does not stratify these patient safety findings by race. However, as part of its efforts for health equity, it will begin collecting information about clinical quality by race in its 2021 Hospital Survey. READ MORE

21st Century Cures Act Prompts HIPAA Check-Up

With the ONC’s information blocking rules coming into full effect on April 5, healthcare organizations should check in on their HIPAA best practices and compliance. These rules represent a sea change in patient data access and data sharing, putting some teeth onto right of access rules that were previously merely suggestions in HIPAA.

“The expectation is that now data should be instantaneously available as long as it’s electronic,” said Sean Sullivan, a senior associate attorney with the Health Care Group of Alston & Bird. “And a lot of providers who miss those new timeframes are going to continue to fall back on that 30-day timeline. It’s a mistake.” READ MORE

Intermountain Taps Predictive Analytics for COVID-19 Care

The healthcare giant, long at the cutting edge of healthcare technology, focused its predictive analytics efforts on building a solid foundation of data. Predictive analytics technologies need time to learn and train on that data, and during the fervor of the COVID-19 pandemic, that element has largely been missed.

“Being able to avert hospitalizations is a really important factor,” said Greg Nelson, assistant vice president of analytics services at Intermountain. ““We want to keep people out of the health system and have them stay well. This is especially true for our most vulnerable populations who otherwise may not have access to care or the ability to afford care. So, these are critical tools in our arsenal.” READ MORE

mHealth Alerts Help Orgs with Care Coordination

At Compass Medical, mHealth alerts are helping clinicians address care gaps in their chronic care populations. These patients, who are sometimes admitted into the hospital with acute symptoms, can see significant gaps in their health records.

“They were just going to the hospital, coming home and then nothing more was happening to them,” says Dhrumil Shah, MD, Compass Medical’s chief medical information officer. “We started to see a huge gap between what we were doing in our exam rooms and what was going on in the hospital. Mostly we didn’t know what our patients were doing there.”

mHealth technology would help fill in those gaps and inform how Compass Medical providers direct care in between clinic and hospital visits, ideally improving care coordination and overall chronic disease management. READ MORE