Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

If there is no mechanism for accessing the history of name changes for an individual, then you should regard the EHR as dangerously immature.

CPT licensing is not a trivial cost. A large

The healthcare system in the United States is easily one of the best in the world, until you need more than one doctor. A single doctor in the United States has met one of the highest standards for medical education in the world, but the system as a whole has been operating in a disconnected fashion for decades. Patients have been forced to coordin

Healthcare providers have been saddled with this cost, despite the fact that most of the benefits of computerization accrue to either patients or insurers. Essentially, until now, EHR systems have been disincentivized.

Similarly, health IT vendors lack motivation to properly support interoperability standards. If the data for a single patient can easily be exported from an EHR, then the data for every patient can also be exported easily. True interoperability means that it is much simpler for one EHR to replace another, and therefore one EHR vendor to be replaced

A billing service is really an outsourced billing department that

amount of cash flow before the medical claims are resolved and paid, which can often take weeks or even months. Without copays, many types of facilities would need significant additional financial reserves to function while waiting for claims to be paid.

analysis. It sells data to pharmacies, insurance companies, EHR vendors, and so on.

Billing operations at medical practices also constitute the most complex workflows of any activity in any industry