Avicenna Medical Blog

EMRs, Meaningful Use and the stimulus money

Posted by Yehuda Bechar on Fri, May 07, 2010 @ 10:37 AM

Do you want to get the stimulus money? Of course, every body wants to get a piece of the pie. But that money comes with some strings attached. Your organization needs to demonstrate the use of an EMR within the Meaningful Use criteria.

As you probably know the government is rolling Meaningful Use in stages. With stage one focusing on the use of an electronic systems to capture patient's information and the ability to share that information across different platforms. But on this stage the actual sharing does not have to take place, in fact is still obscure how this sharing is going to take place. But well that is why there are stages, so we don't have to figure out everything from the beginning. I am sure that as more clinics (big and small) start using EMRs with the sharing capability embedded we will see the rise of local agencies that will collect and distribute the information.

We need to remember all this effort (and money) is just to be able to be more efficient at taking care of the ill.  And that has been our motto at Avicenna from the beginning.  We created this company around the idea that there is always a better way to do things. We are always trying to maximize the use of your resources (health care professionals and supporting staff) to be able to bring down the cost while providing excellent care.  We specialized on the care and support of patients with chronic conditions.

We have demonstrated just that with AviTracks. With the help of AviTracks one clinic was able to triple the number of patients while maintaining the same number of staff. But that is not all, thanks to AviTracks the number of adverse events even decreased. 

Tags: Chronic Care Management / CCM, Meaningful Use, EMR / EHR