This past week I was at the 2017 International MUSE Conference in Dallas Texas.
Great job to everyone from Acmeware for presenting amazing content at the DR Learning Lab workshop and education sessions. Thanks to everyone who visited the Exhibition floor.
I had a productive week with the Acmeware team. To put it into context, I spoke on stage during the week for almost 6 hours. This year I was selected as a featured speaker at the Executive Institute; I conducted a Tuesday training workshop and an I co-presented a Thursday education session. Thanks to everyone who visited us on the Exhibition floor.
Thank you to those who attended my presentation at the Executive Institute. Jodi Frei, Northwestern Medical Center Vermont (first to go-live with Web ED in the universe!), and I co-presented at the MUSE Executive Institute on Revenue at Risk: Understanding Financial Impacts of Quality Reporting. The Executive Institute featured many amazing CXO's discussing the changing landscape of revenue cycle management and how finance, quality, and IT departments are converging on revenue cycle. The Executive Institute was well attended with over 50 facility and commercial members in attendance.
The International MUSE Conference included great speakers and well-crafted content. I presented at a Tuesday training workshop titled The Alphabet Soup of Clinical Quality Measures Reporting and Reimbursement. This was the third year I presented this topic and with all the changing requirements to eCQMs, MACRA and MIPS, and Value-based purchasing. This has been and will continue to be a standard at MUSE over the next couple years.
I co-presented with Jodi on Riding the Rapids of Payment Reform: Downstream Effects of Quality Reporting on Revenue Capture. We spoke to The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) aggressive goals, aimed at increasing the percentage of Medicare payments associated with value-based care versus fee-for-service. The presentation covered programs such as Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) and MACRA being catalysts of this movement. Providers, CIOs, Quality Leaders and IT Informaticists will find this information valuable in navigating the new normal in healthcare payment reform planning for the future of health care reform.
Thursday morning Keynote presentation was given Hoda Sayed-Friel, Executive VP of MEDITECH. Hoda reviewed MEDITECH's product strategy and roadmap. She presented well-organized information on their surveillance, registry, and portal products. She provided some regulatory and compliance updates on MACRA and the MIPS reporting requirements.
Remember when I mentioned in my Dispatch from MUSE 2015 blog on MEDITECH's strategy of offering cloud-based hosted services and potentially partnering with Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google to offer low-cost cloud solutions with a zero infrastructure footprint, well it's almost here and it's called MEDITECH as a Service (MaaS). This service should be available sometime in 2018. Hoda mentioned partnering with a private cloud vendor as a low-cost MaaS options for running MEDITECH and a web-based service.
My opinion, the MEDITECH as a Service (MaaS) could provide EHR access to critical access hospitals (CAH), rural community hospitals and any small hospitals struggling to cover the high start-up costs, capital requirements and insufficient return on investment associated with purchasing an EHR. Additionally, MaaS could provide significant financial incentives to smaller hospitals continuing to struggle with the regulatory and compliance requirements associated with Meaningful Use and MACRA. In a MaaS model, a hospital could provide access MEDITECH to users in their organization using a cloud hosted, a shared-instances model with another facility, essentially sharing the same instances of MEDITECH but secured and protected by a facility.
Hoda also reviewed their recent sales successes as well as their many ongoing development initiatives.
- The patient portal is now a real App! Look for it soon in the App Store.
- Hoda discussed the work they are doing with Nuance Dragon speech recognition solutions to allow a cloud and web-based option with tighter integration and a better clinical user experience. Nuance's advanced speech recognition software once powered Apple's iPhone Siri voice recognition platform.
- MEDITECH would start focusing on Nursing using the web in 2018.
- Hoda gave a shout-out to a couple vendors. Acmeware was one of only a few vendors she specifically mentioned, so kudos to Acmeware and all Acmeware employees!
It was great to see all my friends, colleagues and clients at MUSE and looking forward to next year!
For those who want to say hello, I'm speaking at the Becker's Hospital Review Annual IT and Revenue Cycle Conference at the Hyatt Regency, Chicago on Friday, September 22, 2017, from 2:30 pm to 3:10 pm. Jodi and I will be presenting on Revenue Cycle Optimization: Tools and Strategies for Successfully understanding your revenue at risk in your organization. The session will discuss strategies to improve efficiencies in registration, insurance authorization, clinical documentation improvement, supply chain and denials management; tools and resources for reporting and tracking progress from both a clinical and financial perspective; and how to maintain a high-functioning revenue cycle during times of transition.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
