REACH Audit Readiness Assessments

Sarah Tupper, MS, RN-BC, LHIT, CPHIMS, REACH HIT Consultant
Edited by: Reid Haase, REACH HIT Consultant

Roughly 7.5 billion dollars of incentives have been paid out to eligible hospitals and providers through the EHR Incentive program. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has demanded better oversight of these payments by CMS. CMS has hired a consulting firm (Figliozzi & Co.) to conduct these pre- and post-payment audits of about 5-10% of Meaningful Use program participants.

In late May, based on requests and questions received from clients, REACH decided to begin offering FREE Audit Readiness Assessments to clients with an active Service Level Agreement. More details are available in this flier.

Audit Readiness Assessments can be scheduled in coordination with your REACH HIT Consultant. An on-site visit is scheduled after a prep call. During the site visit, we provide anticipatory guidance to clients for things like:

• How they might hear that they are being audited
• How to organize their files to maintain their audit documentation
• What documents to keep and how long to keep them
• Screen shots to take
• Advice that we have picked up from our clients who have already been audited.

So far, we have received 21 requests for the service at various client sites. 17 of the 21 sites have received or will receive a REACH Audit Readiness Assessment site visit.

We hope to be able to provide the service to all REACH clients who qualify and for which the service is appropriate. I always tell clients that these site visits are fun! It’s fascinating to hear and see the ways in which organizations have come together and, in some cases, gotten quite creative with workflows that support Meaningful Use. We learn together, and hopefully help to reduce the stress clients might feel should they receive audit notification. If you are interested in learning more about the audit process, or would like to schedule one, please contact me: stupper@stratishealth.org (for MN clients) or Patti Kritzberger at: pkritzberger@stratishealth.org (for ND).

National Rural Health Resource Center Releases HIE Toolkit

Joe Wivoda, National Rural Health Resource Center, Chief Information Officer and REACH HIT Consultant

One of the groups that the National Rural Health Resource Center (The Center) provides technical support to are Rural HIT Networks. The Center identified early on that many of the networks were either in the process of selecting a health information exchange (HIE), participating in an HIE, or needed to understand HIE. HIE (as a noun) is a rapidly evolving technology that all health care providers will need to understand, particularly in the context of meaningful use. The Center looked for tools that would assist networks in being involved in an HIE but were unable to find many good tools. Therefore, we partnered with HIELix, a company that consults with HIEs across the country, to develop an HIE toolkit that would be appropriate for the grantees that we support.

This toolkit is exciting because it fills a void that has not bee addressed when most folks talk about HIE (as a verb or noun!). For example, we had a number of questions about policies that were important to have in place when forming an HIE, so we put together a "Policy Matrix" that summarizes the necessary policies and provides links to samples that are available. In addition, there is a Privacy and Security Overview and Resource List that provides a "deep dive" into the issues of privacy and security when participating in an HIE.

Most of us feel comfortable that HIE can have a significant impact on patient care and communication to other providers, but we often need to justify the return on investment as well. The ROI Calculator uses referable studies to provide an estimate of the potential savings when an HIE is fully utilized. The feedback we have heard thus far has been very positive regarding this tool, and I encourage everyone who is thinking about participating in an HIE to go through this spreadsheet. If you are implementing an HIE, we are putting together a pricing model as well, but it is not ready for "prime time". Let us know if you have a need for this, or some ideas!

Other tools that are part of the toolkit are the HIE Direct Guide, which is designed to assist hospitals and providers in understanding and implementing Direct, and the First Considerations document, which discusses first steps in forming or joining an HIE. These are great resources for anyone who needs to understand Direct or is joining an HIE. They are written with as little "techno speak" as possible!

Take a look at these resources, give us feedback, ask us questions, and help us improve them! We are excited about these tools and hope they will help hospitals, clinics, long-term care, homecare, and other providers. With meaningful use Stage 2 starting in just a few weeks, HIE participation will increase and we need to move quickly. Besides Stage 2, better communication between providers is so important in patient safety and quality of care that we need to use HIE (noun) to improve our processes for HIE (verb).

Oh, and sorry for the grammar confusion!