Migraine

Migraine sufferers got some more bad news on Monday, when the results of a study determined that "sufferers are also more prone to splitting head pain after drinking too much."

The American Academy of Dermatology recently released guidelines for the management and treatment of psoriasis using UV light therapy, including patient considerations and the use of UV therapy alone or in conjunction with other treatments.

Today's panel discussion on improving the quality of care through quality, innovation, and service included some all star presenters. If this team were a baseball team they'd be the Yankees; we're talking about some big names. We have Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, president and chief executive officer of Cleveland Clinic; Dr. William Wright, Executive Medical Director Colorado Permanente Medical Group; and Dr. Gary S. Kaplan, Chairman and CEO of the Virginia Mason Health System.

Dahl and Rahman sought to help attendees analyze performance systems management and apply applications to their practice, establish core measurements and define collection processes, and compare improvement tools, such as root-cause analysis and “what-if” analyses.

Anne Huben-Kearney, vice president, risk management, ProMutual Group, Boston, MA, today presented “EMR with Clinical Risk Management = Patient Safety: A Model for Success.” We spoke with her to learn about her experiences working with a health information exchange and professional liability carrier and how and why risk management components can and should be implemented into an EMR.

Electronic Health Records – the three words that you’ve probably heard a billion times. They are the words that lead to other words that you hear over and over again: incentives, penalties, integration, etc. Many physicians admittedly hesitate to implement an EHR in their practice for numerous reasons. But aside from the big ones, such as cost, security, and the time it takes, there’s one major barrier – interoperability.

Although private practices are usually using debt financing because they don’t have the funds, hospitals do have the funds. And if you don’t join them, they’ll go buy their own physician who is in your specialty.

This session focuses on the recently released ICD-10 regulation and its impact on your practice. This session addresses critical issues such as practice compliance dates; the intersection of ICD-10 and the latest version of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) electronic transactions standards; how physician practices can address the many challenges ICD-10 will bring in the areas of payer contracting, encounter documentation, staff training, research and benchmarking data, and software modifications; and how to work with vendors and payers to comply with this mandate.

Today’s discussion on EHR incentive payments and implementation included a lot of issues that regular MDNG readers are familiar with: HITECH, “meaningful use,” and annual incentives. Although it may seem like the same old song and dance, the reality is that all those dates you’ve been hearing about are fast approaching.

Decision-making in medical practices is often stalled by competing interests, conflicting goals and misunderstandings. In this session, you will learn from real-life examples why impasses occur and the problems they create for physicians, staff and patients. You will discover how to gain agreement through using a voting matrix and how to test alternatives and devise voting options. In addition, you will learn the role of confidentiality in protecting future working relationships in the medical practice.

Leah Cohen, a Government Affairs Representative for MGMA, led off her presentation today by announcing to the large crowd that she is “only the messenger.” It was a great way to break the ice, and her comment got many laughs from the physicians in the audience who were looking to her to sort out some of the legislation that affects them.

Dr. Michelle Koury began her session by explaining the goals of her session: to help attendees learn to organize leadership to pursue and achieve accreditation, apply strategies and tools to assist in accreditation success, and understand the organizational, financial, regulatory, and political advantages of accreditation.

The easiest way to avoid any kind of HIPAA problems is to make sure that your patients’ personal health information (PHI) is secure – by definition, secure PHI cannot be breached. Best to get prepared now because as HIPAA informs, the penalties they-are-a-comin.

Today's MGMA session on Web 2.0 was a very interesting session to sit in on, not only because of the subject matter, but also because of the audience interaction.

The uninsured, higher co-pays and consumer-directed plans are changing the dynamics of the physician economic relationship. Patients seek less costly care while others approach decisions in consumer retail mode. Fortunately these trends are spurring adoption of Internet tools that deliver accessible, affordable and convenient care. Physicians easily interact online with patients on non-urgent symptoms. Point-of-service and self-service capabilities drive collections and develop payment plans. Testimonials illuminate the convergence of clinical and financial Web tools translated to savings and better outcomes.

As medical groups feel more pressure from the government, payers and other third parties to get health information online as part of emerging performance-based reimbursement programs, many providers are challenged with how best to automate their practices and adequately participate in these programs. This session will explore how some of the country's largest academic medical groups to solo practices to emerging care deliver organizations, like retail clinical, are now leveraging software-enabled services (SeS) in order to better document and report clinical and financial data as part of performance-based reimbursement initiatives.

While always uncertain, the future seems more so in economic hard times. How can you know how best to respond to changes in patient volume or reimbursement?

There remains a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the economic stimulus package incentives and the steps practices must take to receive these incentives. This session will provide an overview of HIT, EHR and TeleHealth incentives related to the stimulus package and prepare practices for what they must do to adopt and "meaningfully use" certified EHRs . An HIT and government affairs expert will help create a roadmap for the term "meaningful use" and inform practices on how to follow this map.

At a healthcare forum hosted by Politics magazine, current and former members of Congress said they believed President Obama would sign some sort of a healthcare reform package, most likely later this year. “There would be too much political damage done if something doesn’t pass, so Congress will find a way,” said Congressman Michael Burgess, MD (R-TX).

Professionals should educate and monitor their pain patients' use of alcohol according to a University of Florida study which found that use of alcohol as a pain management strategy was consistent across the three patient groups, ranging from 25 to 28 percent. Use was more prevalent in men and corresponded to higher income levels.

Despite widespread use of smartphones to perform a variety of tasks, experts say consumers are still waiting for the right incentives to push them to use their phones to access personal health records and manage their medical information on the go.

After investigating the 2006 deaths of three patients in their treatment of pain using intrathecal infusion pumps containing opioids, researchers are confident that such future complications are preventable.

Individuals who go to work with a migraine, with the thought that it is better to “endure the pain” and stay at work, are actually less productive than individuals who stay home because of a migraine, with the level of productivity while suffering from a migraine is impacted by whether the migraine is chronic or episodic, the results of two new studies show.

A study presented at the 14th International Headache Congress found that patients who get migraines with aura are at an increased risk for ischemic stroke when compared to patients who do not get migraines.

According to an article in the online news organization Huffington Post, physicians are increasingly bringing their views on healthcare reform into the examination room.

Even though many believe that everything possible was being done to help them and that they were given the most appropriate treatment, few patients believe thier medicines strong enough to provide relief.

Study results indicate that patients are having an average of three pain episodes per day, but a typical medication does not take effect until halfway through an episode.

Many states are seeing the HITECH money as an opportunity to aggressively promote health IT to improve healthcare through adoption of EHRs and health information exchanges.

An Ameritox study found that of 938,586 urine toxicology tests administered to chronic pain patients over a three-year period, 11% detected major illicit drugs and 29% had a medication in their system that the patient's doctor was likely unaware of.

A new study by IBM shows that a large portion of Americans find filling out “repetitive paperwork” at the doctor’s office to be a waste of time; the study also reveals that a large majority of Americans feel the need for more access to their physicians.