The following excerpt is from an article found on PR Newswire. It was written by The Advisory Board. ----------------------------------------- While care transformation continues to lead the list of concerns for hospital and health system executives, this year two of the top four topics relate to patients' non-clinical needs, according to The Advisory Board Company's Annual Health Care CEO Survey. Specifically, meeting consumer expectations and patient engagement made notable moves up the list.

Information is power. The more useful and actionable information you can provide to your patients, the better off they will be because when the details sink in, you’ll be able to improve how you care for them. These days, patients have access to more health-related information than ever before thanks to databases connected to the internet and various websites from government, academia and the medical industry. Access to this store of knowledge doesn’t guarantee that patients will take advantage of it, though. And when patients do research on their own, they may wind up inadvertently relying on bogus information that could steer them wrong about treatments, medications and the very nature of diseases, injuries and other ailments.

The more efficient healthcare providers become in the services they provide, especially to patients who are covered through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the more resources we will have at our disposal. To that end, CMS recently released some tips to help eligible professionals, hospitals and critical care hospitals as they attest to meaningful use this year. If you don’t comply with the meaningful use criteria, your organization won’t be eligible to get the financial incentives offered by the government for CMS patients. It’s in your best interest to do your part, so here are four tips for successful meaningful use attestation.

The success of any given country or even a civilization over the long run has a great deal to do with the overall health of its people. By paying close attention to the medical prospects of a group in the face of common ailments, for example, researchers can detect patterns and come up with methods to treat emerging problems before they get too out of hand. From controlling the number of people who fall ill to infectious diseases to dealing with the growing issue of violence in crowded cities, monitoring the health of groups is an important aspect of our medical system.

In a profession like medicine where there are so many unique terms and important phrases to use on a regular basis, doctors, nurses and others find themselves using acronyms to speed up communication.

As part of its efforts to control costs and improve how we provide healthcare to people in the United States, the government established a program designed to open floodgates of information from medical organizations. The Physician Quality Reporting System or PQRS is a program through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Doctors working in their own practice or in a group practice are encouraged to provide reports to show what quality of care they offer to patients through Medicare. This information is valuable and the government established incentives to encourage participation. With that in mind, read on to learn more about the importance of reporting PQRS data.

Efficiency should be the name of the game at your medical practice, but not at the expense of giving patients less time and attention, of course. Areas where you can make up the time include patient communications with staff, issuing lab results and carrying out data entry. For many busy medical practices that already have set up electronic health record software, adding a patient portal to the mix is an ideal way to streamline common procedures and save both staff and patients a lot of time and effort. If you have been on the fence about using an EHR and a portal, read on for three ways patient portals can improve your practice’s efficiency.

It has been a little more than a year since the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services or CMS began paying for chronic care management services separately under its Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. The new payment scheme began January 1, 2015. This is something worth paying attention to, since approximately two out of every three patients on Medicare are contending with at least two chronic conditions, according to a recent report from CMS.

The type of medical organization you run has a great deal to do with whether many of your patients will require transitional care management, but TCM is an issue you should stay on top no matter how often it comes up of because industry and government updates can influence the way you do business.

With the arrival of every new technological innovation, we have to create new terms to cover the devices and systems we develop and implement. This is especially the situation in the fields of medicine and healthcare, given the pace of developments and the often-crucial nature of the new items being created. A case in point has to do with the terms “telehealth” and “telemedicine.” With so many people using these words without bothering to be precise in their definitions, it’s no wonder that medical professionals and patients alike become confused when confronting either term.