Oct 25, 2010 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Clinical laboratories and pathology groups must be ready to support physicians’ EMR adoption
In 2011, physicians can earn federal incentives for adopting electronic medical record (EMR) systems and demonstrating “meaningful use.” Every clinical laboratory and pathology group must be ready to deal with this new development. That’s because hundreds of thousands of physicians are about to embark on EMR implementation in their practices—with or without laboratory participation.
Meaningful use was the theme of The Dark Report’s audio conference conducted last month.
Three Experts on Clinical Pathology Laboratory Informatics
Pathologists and clinical laboratory managers participating in the audio conference heard three national experts speak about how mass adoption of EMRs by the nation’s physicians would affect three specific areas of laboratory informatics. The audio conference was titled “How Meaningful Use and EMR Adoption Will Reshape Your Lab’s Competitive Future—and Its Profitability”.
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Sep 23, 2010 | Laboratory Pathology, News From Dark Daily
Some U.S. laboratories already ramping up their LIS resources to meet demand for LIS-to-EMR interfaces
Clinical laboratory managers and pathology groups need to prepare for what is expected to be a tsunami of requests by physicians who want their newly-implemented electronic medical record (EMR) systems to be interfaced with their laboratory’s LIS. This approaching tsunami is a consequence of the billions in federal incentive payments designed to encourage doctors to adopt EMRs.
It means lab managers and pathologists must actively prepare their medical laboratory to step up and support the “meaningful use” needs of client physicians. As mandated by the HITECH Act, healthcare providers are required to engage in “meaningful” patient health information (PHI) exchanges. Because more than 400,000 physicians will implement electronic medical records (EMR) in the next 60 months, labs should not delay in establishing a strategy.
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Sep 17, 2010 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Clinical laboratories and pathology groups are likely to need LIS upgrades
Clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups may soon face the need to upgrade or switch their laboratory information system (LIS) to a version that is HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 capable. This is likely to be an overlooked consequence of the mass adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems by physicians across the country.
Between 2011 and 2015, it is predicted that 350,000 or more physicians will implement an EMR and use it in their daily practice. This is happening because of the federal incentives provided by the HITECH Act. The scale of the coming tidal wave of EMR adoption is revealed in a recent Frost & Sullivan report .
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Sep 13, 2010 | Laboratory Management and Operations, Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology
Digital pathology is major trend in the clinical pathology laboratory industry
Among the three dominant trends in anatomic pathology informatics, digital pathology is expected to be of the highest interest to the attendees at this year’s Pathology Informatics 2010 annual conference, which takes place in Boston on September 19-22.
“More pathologists are paying attention to digital pathology because of the swift advances in the technology in recent years,” stated Bruce Friedman, Active Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the University of Michigan Medical School and President of the Pathology Education Consortium (PEC) is a conference organizer. “For example, new digital scanners make it faster and cheaper to produce a whole slide image that has rich detail.
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May 10, 2010 | Instruments & Equipment, Laboratory Pathology, Management & Operations
Surge of requests for LIS-to-EMR interfaces will soon hit clinical pathology laboratories
EMR adoption by office-based physicians is about to seriously challenge the capability of the nation’s clinical pathology laboratories to quickly build interfaces with the electronic medical record (EMR) systems of their client doctors. That’s the prediction of one of the nation’s foremost experts on how to connect clinical pathology laboratories with physician EMRs.
“Today, only one of four physicians uses electronic medical records. To encourage more physicians to adopt medical record systems over the next five years, the ARRA stimulus package is offering major financial incentives,” observed Pat Wolfram, Vice President of Marketing and Customer Service at Ignis Systems Corporation in Portland, Oregon. “In fact, if the federal government achieves its goals as set forth in the current stimulus package, we can expect more than 300,000 physicians to adopt EMRs over the next five years!”
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