Tag: mental health billing software

Alphabet Soup: HITSP, CCHIT, ONCHIT, SNOMED CT

Posted on | by SOS Blog | 4 Comments on Alphabet Soup: HITSP, CCHIT, ONCHIT, SNOMED CT

I try to keep informed about Electronic Medical records (EMRs), certification of those products, and funding for them provided through the economic stimulus bill (ARRA). After all, as a developer and vendor of a behavioral health EMR, I really should know some of this stuff. This week, I was struck by the number of acronyms that have come into common parlance in the past six months. I find the amount of information being generated about healthcare information technology (HIT) overwhelming. I am sure it feels even worse to someone who has not been trying to keep up with this information. After all, who can possibly know what all of these shorthands stand for and mean? 

So what would any good technology hound do? Well, of course, I googled ‘Health Information Technology acronyms‘ to see who out there has started to organize this information for the public. To my pleasant surprise, several documents attempt to do just that.

To start with, our federal department of Health and Human Services has a whole web site dedicated to HIT. On the left side of the page, there is a list of tabs. Under Resources there is a page called Acronyms. And that is just what it is. A list of the letters used as the shorthand referents for 112 terms ranging alphabetically from AHIC (American Health Information Community) to WW (Wounded Warrior). You can then cut and paste a name into the Search box on the top right of the page to find documents on the site that reference this “term”. When I do this for American Health Information Community, I get a list of 601 documents linked to this site that refer to AHIC in some fashion. If I do this same search on Google, I get about 129,000,000 hits. Be careful what you search for!

The Rural Health Resource Center, a not-for-profit located in Duluth, Minnesota has a document containing a list of 53 acronyms including brief definitions or descriptions of the terms or organizations listed as well as links to the sites of some of the organizations described.

Likewise, the Department of Health Services of the state of Wisconsin has published a list of acronyms and what they stand for. This list relates to eHealth rather than just health information technology, so it is bound to have some different entries.

A web site created by Pivotal Solution Group called HITECH Answers has their own list of acronyms and definitions. Pivotal Solution Group is a coaching and consultancy organization…a private group as opposed to the government sources listed above.

And finally, the Software and Technology Vendor Association (SATVA), a trade association of behavioral health software vendors to which we belong, has developed a section on their web site to monitor information regarding behavioral health EMR certification. Behavioral Health Certification Watch will be updated as new information is received. 

While some of you have probably clicked on the links above, I think it highly unlikely that you will spend much time reviewing this information. After all, who has the time to go looking into the masses of information that are being created about HIT, certification of products and paying for those products. Most behavioral health organizations are likely to just continue doing what they do until someone finally tells them they must move to an electronic medical record (EMR) by a certain date or they will not get paid for the services they provide. Oh wait, that is what has happened…at least, for Medicare and Medicaid payments.

Is that enough to start movement toward an EMR in your organization? Is your practice beginning to consider the possibilities? What do you believe it will take to move mental health providers into EMRs?

Measuring the Quality of Mental Health Treatment

Posted on | by SOS Blog | 2 Comments on Measuring the Quality of Mental Health Treatment

This week’s entry is a guest article by Dr. Vince Bellwoar, a psychologist user of our software whose practice is located in Pennsylvania. Vince posted a question on our SOS user group about how other users measure quality of care. This spurred significant discussion on that group. I am hopeful that it will also stir up some discussion here. -Kathy

 

Our practice has always aspired to provide excellent quality. What business hasn’t? This article is meant to stimulate discussion as how to address and improve the quality of clinical practice.

We emphasize two points in hiring: 5 years of solid clinical work and very good people skills. If we can’t imagine a range of patients connecting with you, we are not hiring you. The next step is to monitor how well the therapist holds patients. Billing software with decent reporting capabilities can be an invaluable resource here.

Patients who stay in treatment tend to get better, and as they improve, they’ll refer others. In contrast, therapists who lose 40% of new referrals by the 3rd session usually are doing so out of errors of omission or commission. Our billing software allows us to mine the data that tells us what percent of new referrals continue with each therapist after the 3rd session. Granted, this is a blunt assessment tool; and so we have searched for other means of assessment.

After my car is in the shop for service, I get a call asking, “How did we do?” We tried something similar with a patient satisfaction survey sent to patients whose last treatment session was more than six weeks ago. (This assumes that a six week break from treatment meant the client was done with treatment for now). Unfortunately, the return rate was only 10% even though we provided stamped return envelopes or used email. Our next attempt will be to put the survey in waiting rooms with large signs encouraging completion. We want to keep the surveys out of the treatment session as many believe this could change the nature of the treatment session.

There are numerous satisfaction surveys out there. I find the ones constructed by insurance companies are particularly bad, not to mention self-serving. They see success as getting patients out of treatment ASAP. We constructed our own survey, yet it doesn’t seem to get at the heart of the matter: what was specifically helpful or not helpful in the therapy session. What did the therapist do (commit) or not do (omit) that made the treatment better or worse?

Our next survey version will pose these open-ended questions. I hope that this will generate the type of quantitative and hearty data that can complement the qualitative data from our billing software—and ultimately be beneficial to therapists.

Our goal is to identify what happens in a therapy session that makes a therapist “good”. Then we can give the therapist concrete, usable feedback that encourages improvement. We want people who are interested in this type of feedback, whether they are a therapist, secretary, psychiatrist, and, yes, even the owner!

I welcome your feedback.

Vince Bellwoar, Ph.D.
http://www.springfieldpsychological.com

Are your passwords HIPAA secure?

Posted on | by SOS Blog | 4 Comments on Are your passwords HIPAA secure?

Standard advice for securing computer systems is to require users to change passwords frequently. Something about this recommendation has always bothered me, but I never really thought it through. A current blog posting at Healthcare Informatics by Dale Sanders really hits the nail on the head. He points out that these change-passwords-frequently policies actually undercut password security rather than enhancing it, once you factor in human psychology. If you have to replace your password frequently, you will probably come up with something simplistic, or resort to a post-it note on the monitor, or maintain a paper list. It would be far more secure to create a single, strong password or passphrase and continue to use it for a much longer period.

To manage passwords used on the web, you can’t go wrong with Roboform. Create a strong master password (long, and using a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters), then let Robo’s password generator suggest strong passwords for individual web sites. Once you select and use a password on a web site, Robo will remember and “type” it in for you when you next visit that site. All you have to do is enter your master password once in each browser session; Robo uses that to unlock your password library and cleverly selects the right one whenever you hit a login window. There is even a version of Roboform that you can install on a USB “thumb” drive, so you can securely carry your passwords with you for use on multiple computers, or even public computers when traveling.

In the course of providing technical support on our billing and EMR software, I am exposed to the password selections of many of our users. It is amazing how rare it is to find anyone using serious passwords. Names, almost surely loved ones or pets, are the most common, but way too frequently I see passwords that are identical to user IDs, or non-passwords like “123” and “password”. Although we have optional rules in our products that would require strong password choices if enabled, they rarely are used.

Coming up with an easily remembered, secure, master password is not really all that hard. Just think up a short sentence that includes punctuation and some numbers. You can check the quality of your choice using Microsoft’s password checker.

Here’s an example: “Turning 60! soon.” This easily remembered phrase is actually more secure than “3-vO$aLKG7”, which conforms to all the standard password creation advice.

Maintaining medical privacy is serious business. Current HIPAA rules provide for serious penalties when medical information is not properly secured. Are you guilty of password negligence yourself?

Seth Krieger

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ARRA and Mental Health EHR Software

Posted on | by SOS Blog | 6 Comments on ARRA and Mental Health EHR Software

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) contains provisions for spending approximately $19 billion in health IT infrastructure and Medicare and Medicaid incentives to press providers to use health IT, according the NJAMHA Newswire , a publication of the NJ Association of Mental Health Associations. The National eHealth Collaborative, the replacement for AHIC (the American Health Information Community), is clearly relieved that this funding has been approved, assuring their continued existence. They tout the law’s determination to solicit “broad stakeholder input” and “full participation of stakeholders” in the process of recommending how to accelerate adoption of use of health IT.  The National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare cheers their successful work to include community mental health centers as eligible entities for the available funding.

As a small company that provides mental health EHR software, mental health billing software and medical office billing software to small provider organizations, we are very concerned that the voices of those small providers will get lost in the shuffle. There is no question that hospital systems and the physicians who are part of those systems will adopt medical EMR software as well as other IT tools that will facilitate the deployment of health IT in the general medical arena. The size of those organizations will also make it easier for them to apply for some of the funding that will be available. But what about the solo mental health practitioner or the small group practice or even the large group practice?

While SOS Software has been involved to some extent in the development of a standard for a behavioral health EHR, we have been concerned from the start that the standard will make software too costly for the small provider to acquire. While our current product is very affordable, we do not yet know what the effect of requiring certification for EHRs will be on the cost of our products. We expect to raise this issue repeatedly in this space and other forums in which we participate over the next couple of years in hopes that some of you will be stimulated to get involved and to express your opinions about how far-reaching the requirements should be and what assistance you will need to adopt a mental health EHR in your practice.

Please let us know what you think and how you would like to be involved.

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