Hospitals in rural areas lag behind in health IT adoption due to which they face difficulties in care co-ordination. It not only impacts patient outcome in such areas but also affects the way these hospitals collect, share, use and manage health information.
With few employees, less money and less time, rural hospitals are struggling to adopt EHR systems. Since they are not able to adopt and ensure “meaningful use” of EHRs, it has become difficult for them to fulfil the eligibility criteria for financial incentives under HITECH.
How rural hospitals can overcome these challenges?
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Rural hospitals will have to solve the issue of financing and recruiting full time IT and nursing personnel by collaborating with other hospitals or outsourcing all hospitalist medical billing services to a billing partner. This will help rural hospitals eliminate the limitation of staffing throughout the health IT adoption and implementation process
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Rural hospitals can take assistance from potentially expensive consulting firms in establishment and maintenance of IT network infrastructure. Hospitals will have to apply for supplementary funds or grants to find finance for such consulting services
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Time and assistance will be required from federal programs for educating the existing workforce on how to use the latest health information technologies
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Stakeholders such as technicians, clinicians, front and back office staff will have to be engaged for successful adoption process
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Rural hospitals will have to invest time in comparing health IT products for better selection
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Since the implementation of health IT will create various security and privacy concerns, rural hospitals will have to be extra careful in adopting the necessary privacy measures to address any future risks of security breach
Why rural hospitals are seeking help from a billing specialist?
Due to new reforms and increase in documentation requirements, errors are happening on a frequent basis, affecting finance of rural hospitals. For this reason, such hospitals are seeking assistance from a billing specialist for the following reasons:
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A billing partner will handle increased documentation for error-free HIE implementation
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Guidance will be provided for proper usage of software
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Rural hospitals will be able to reduce the chances of errors in health IT adoption
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Effective hospitalist medical billing services will be offered to maximize revenue and minimize claim denials
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Hospitals will be provided timely industry updates by the billing partner to help keep HIE up to date
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Payment collection will become simplified which will help strengthen the cash flow of rural hospitals
Billing specialists likeMedicalbillersandcoders.com have a team of expert who have been helping rural hospitals across the US in successful implementation of health IT. Our team is not only skilled in handling hospitalist medical billing services and health IT but also offer services related to EHR sourcing, implementation and monitoring. Main aim of MBC is to help rural hospitals eliminate the headache of hiring and training IT staff and to strengthen their revenue cycle for improved cash flow.
Published By - Medical Billers and Coders
Published Date - Nov-11-2013
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