Healthcare Policy Archives

How MACRA Will Shift Providers’ IT Efforts

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | Jul 19, 2016 | Archives

The 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) opened the way for the Department of Health and Human Services to streamline the quality improvement and healthcare information technology programs built over the past several years. In addition, the...

EHR Vendors Raise Provider Expectations for Other IT Vendors

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | May 17, 2016 | Archives

The passage of the HITECH Act in 2009 led to the deployment of thousands of electronic medical record systems throughout the U.S. in both acute and ambulatory care settings. In an effort to insure that value was derived from this investment of federal funds, the...

Rein in National Drug Spending

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | Feb 5, 2016 | Healthcare Policy

Although overall healthcare cost inflation remains relatively small, healthcare spending just passed 18 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product at the end of 2015. Because of the size of healthcare as a component of the nation’s expenditures, this continued...

Putting Interoperability on FHIR

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | Jan 27, 2016 | Healthcare IT

The release of the Office of the National Coordinator’s (ONC) Connecting Health and Care for the Nation marks a dramatic shift from focus on Meaningful Use to incenting all stakeholders to fix our interoperability problem. While the HITECH act moved the nation’s...

Predicting the Future: What to Look for in 2016

by Barry P Chaiken, MD | Jan 20, 2016 | Archives

The role of a prognosticator is to accurately predict the future. Although many have tried to predict the trend of the stock market, an imminent earthquake, or even the end of the world, soothsayers rarely get their predictions correct. That said, they are very...