It is a lively time for healthcare practice management to say the
least. Key clinical, administrative and financial workflows need to be
updated in order to accommodate new standards such as ICD-10 for coding
and HIPAA 5010 for electronic transmission of healthcare transactions.
New care delivery models such as Accountable Care Organizations (ACO’s)
require further changes to enable collaboration, or team-based care,
across providers and agencies. This rapidly changing environment is
putting a strain on Health-IT departments. How can IT enable clinical
end-users to do their jobs efficiently, enable collaboration across
organizations and comply with an ever growing set of standards and
regulations?
Some
healthcare organizations are turning to the cloud, specifically
software-as-a-service (SaaS), to enable key components of the overall
solution. Software companies with expertise in healthcare can build
support for standards and regulations right into their applications,
reducing the compliance burden required of a dedicated IT staff. Updates
to SaaS applications generally are less intrusive to end-users as they
are centrally hosted and managed. Furthermore, such applications can be
accessed from a multitude of locations and client devices, providing the
basis for the type of collaboration and information sharing that will
be required as ACO’s and other collaborative care models become more
commonplace. More details here