MedPAC to call for national Medicare ED coding approach
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) is to put together official recommendations to HHS since there isn’t any standard guidelines at the moment resulting in hospitals developing their own internal guidelines for reporting an ED visit.
Medsphere acquires ED technology company Wellsoft
Health IT company Medsphere Systems plans to acquire emergency department information systems specialist Wellsoft. Medsphere plans to combine Wellsoft’s emergency department IT platform with its existing RCM Cloud revenue cycle suite and its CareVue electronic health record platform to offer a comprehensive solution for urgent care centers.
Using telehealth to conduct medication reconciliation
The fast pace nature of the ED makes it hard to complete tedious, yet critical processes like medication reconciliation. Creating an accurate list of a patient’s current medication history can be challenging. The patients sometimes forget or misidentify their medications, so apart of the process involves verifying the list with the patient’s pharmacy. Prior to the launch of the tele-medication reconciliation program, everything was done by doctors or pharmacists. Now, the pharmacy techs and interns upload and verify lists of the patient’s medications into the EHR for the pharmacist to review. This now lets the pharmacists spend more time reviewing the list to identify adverse drug interactions or side effects, which are noted for the physicians in the EHR.