Maryland Health Care Commission

UMd., Hopkins docs to advise on new medical home program

They are joining with officials from the Maryland Health Care Commission and Community Health Resource Commission to form the Maryland Learning Collaborative. The collaborative will train and educate primary care practices taking part in the pilot Maryland Multi-Payer Patient-Centered Medical Home program.

The idea is that primary care doctors act as home bases for patients and work with them and their specialists, hospitals and home care providers to make health care decisions. The program aims to make health care more effective and efficient in the state, and the collaborative will be looking at how to best put it into practice.

Dr. Niharika Khanna , an associate professor of family and community medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine , will be director of the collaborative. Fifty-five primary care practices have signed on to be part of the pilot program and will be trained by the collaborative.

The group is planning to visit practices, offer meetings, webinars and conference calls, and hold regional meetings to help figure out the best way to set up a patient-centered medical home program.

MedChi Network Services to assist Maryland ... - Sentinel Health

Recently MedChi, The Maryland State Medical Society, was in the news for their recent efforts with the State of Maryland to assist physicians with EHR adoption.  See below for the full press release.

BALTIMORE, January 19, 2011 – Maryland physicians with MedChi, The Maryland State Medical Society, have taken the first step in adopting electronic health records (EHRs). MedChi has enrolled in a Maryland Health Care Commission program to become a Management Service Organization (MSO), an initiative that is part of the Governor’s plan to keep the state on the cutting edge of health care.

Governor O’Malley held a Forum on Children and Health IT at Coppin State University Monday, January 10, to create strategies so the state can continue to meet the health needs of all Marylanders. On January 3, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began registration for physicians seeking incentives for reaching meaningful use of EHRs.

Through these efforts and the commitment of physicians and Governor O’Malley’s administration, thousands of doctors will switch from paper to electronic records. The result will be improved outcomes and efficiency and decreased waste and mistakes.

“Thanks to the proactive efforts of the Governor, MedChi is in a position to fulfill an extremely valuable need,” said Dr. Hexter, President of MedChi. “Technology is transforming how we practice medicine, but it is also adding a lot of complexity. Through this program, MedChi will give practices the knowledge to harness new systems without causing disruption to their main duty – caring for patients.”

The health care industry is experiencing a revolution. Advances in technology allow physicians to document patient visits electronically and communicate results in real-time to other practitioners such as pharmacists or specialists. Maryland is one of the first states to embrace this technology, harnessing Federal programs as well as creating state-specific incentives.

Federal funding for health IT was first created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in 2009 by the Obama Administration. One component of that act is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act that sets forth the development policy to build a nationwide health IT infrastructure. The goal is to establish an EHR for each individual in the U.S. by 2014.

Governor O’Malley and the General Assembly built upon federal legislation through House Bill 706, Electronic Health Records-Regulation and Reimbursement, which directed the Maryland Health Care Commission to designate a statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE). The objective is to link individual EHRs together across one central exchange. MedChi, as a state-designated MSO, will work with doctors to implement EHR systems that link to the exchange.

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