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Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, January 27, 2020   Practice Fusion Inc. Admits to Kickback Scheme Aimed at Increasing Opioid Prescriptions Practice Fusion Inc. (Practice Fusion), a San Francisco-based health information technology developer, will pay $145 million to resolve criminal and civil investigations relating to its electronic health records (EHR) software, the Department of Justice announced today.As part of the criminal resolution, Practice Fusion admits that it solicited and received kickbacks from a major opioid company in exchange for utilizing its EHR software to influence physician prescribing of opioid pain medications.  Practice Fusion...

Norma Diaz and her husband, Joseph Garcia, have dedicated their careers to running a nonprofit health insurer that covers some of California’s neediest residents. For three decades, they have worked for a Medicaid managed-care plan, Community Health Group, serving nearly 300,000 poor and disabled patients in San Diego County under a state contract funded entirely by taxpayers. They’ve earned above-average ratings for patient care. And in the process, they’ve made millions of dollars. Together, Diaz and Garcia made $1.1 million in 2016 and received more than $5 million since 2012. Diaz’s compensation as CEO exceeded the pay of several peers...

Electronic health records were supposed to lower administrative costs, but they may not be getting the job done, according to a new study published this week in JAMA. Administrative costs made up as much as a quarter of professional revenue for some patient encounters, according to the study, which focused on a single academic medical center. Researchers attribute much of the high cost to varying contracts between the hospital and health plans and payer as well as varying price schedules. "After investing more than $30 billion in health IT, we haven't improved the administrative efficiency," said Dr. Kevin Schulman, one...

The legality of Vermont's all-payer claims database At issue in Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company is whether or not the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act supersedes Vermont's law that requires insurers to report data to its all-payer claims database. Liberty Mutual argues that it does, and thus refused to provide that state with the information that its law required. The Supreme Court agreed June 29 to hear the case, according to the Court's list of cases set to be argued in the term starting in October. Oral arguments have not yet been scheduled for the case, but recently,...

As America hears of more doctors leaving the profession, the head of a patient-centered national health care organization based in St. Paul, Minnesota, sees both political parties in Washington making matters worse. “Huge things are happening under the surface that people don’t understand,” says Twila Brase, a public health nurse and the founder of the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom in this 33 minute video interview with The Daily Caller. “The power of the doctor is becoming subsumed by the government.” America is moving, from Brase’s perspective, from the charitable human “mission of medicine” to a cold, sterile “business of...

WASHINGTON -- About a decade ago, a doctor friend was lamenting the increasingly frustrating conditions of clinical practice.

Should the EHR be blamed? After a Texas hospital let Liberian Thomas Duncan go home (with Ebola), hospital officials blamed the electronic health record (EHR). A day later, they retracted their statement -- without explanation. The retraction is only partially correct. EHRs don't send sick adults home with fevers spiking to 103-degrees. People do. But sometimes that's because the system makes good care difficult. In this case, the EHR is at least partially to blame. EHRs are primarily for data collection. They were built for billing, not for patient care. Ask doctors and nurses what a mess Obama's EHR mandate...

According to two new studies published Wednesday by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), U.S. physicians and hospitals are rapidly increasing the use of electronic health records (EHRs). The two studies found that in 2013: •Nearly 78 percent of office-based physicians acknowledged they had implemented some form of EHR system. •About half of all physicians had an EHR system with advanced functionalities, nearly double the rate of four years before. •About 59 percent of hospitals had an EHR system with advanced functionalities, nearly quadruple the rate of two years before. The HHS claims that...

For better or worse, the incursion of national governments into health care—including our own Medicare system—has permanently altered virtually all aspects of how care is delivered. Even before the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) explicitly brought federal control to every facet of this industry irrespective of the type of insurance coverage, Medicare’s influence would reach far beyond its statutory purview of health care for seniors. Not surprisingly, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has become the lead agency for Obamacare, and, somewhat ironically, has spared no expense in the pursuit of saving money on health care. For example, CMS...

<p>Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, a Philadelphia orthopedic surgeon, has a timely reminder for everyone encountering the federal health-care-exchange meltdown: “If you think signing up for Obamacare is a nightmare, ask your doctor how the EMR mandate is going.”</p> <p>Bingo.</p> <p>The White House finally acknowledged the spectacular public disaster of Obamacare’s Internet exchange infrastructure during Monday’s Rose Garden infomercial. But President ShamWow and his sales team are AWOL on the bureaucratic ravages of the federal electronic-medical-records mandate.</p>

WASHINGTON – An eHealth agreement, promoting a common approach on the interoperability of EHRs and on training the health IT workforce, was signed between Europe and the United States on Friday. Vice-President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius signed the Memorandum of Understanding in Washington. The agreement aims to boost the potential of the eHealth market for EU companies wishing to do business in the U.S. and vice-versa. "Nothing makes more of a difference to people's lives than good health," said Kroes. "I warmly welcome today's agreement. It is an excellent basis for the Commission...

THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG THE BLOG TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM Facts Are Stubborn Things Posted by Macon Phillips Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things." Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions. In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53857 Obama Announces Joint Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record By Donna Miles American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, April 9, 2009 – President Barack Obama announced plans today to create a joint virtual lifetime electronic record that will improve care and services to transitioning veterans by smoothing the flow of medical records between the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments. The concept, long advocated by officials in both departments, is considered a major step toward improving the delivery of care and services to servicemembers transitioning from military to civilian life. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and...

DR. WAX is a family physician based in Mullica Hill, N.J. He reports having no conflicts of interest related to this editorial.I consider myself a computer literate physician. In high school, I taught myself to program in BASIC on my Atari 800, which had a whopping 48K RAM. In college, I transitioned to the Apple Macintosh. At medicine morning rounds, I saw the Palm Pilot Pro and had to have one. I've been desktop and mobile computing ever since. I had spent the past 6 years investigating electronic health record (EHR) systems when, finally, on Black Friday 2009, I took...

Two weeks ago, I received a letter from the radiology department at a large university medical center in my state. The return address specified their mammography registry. Assuming that it was a reminder to get my yearly exam, I started to toss it out. Then I remembered that I'd never had a mammogram at that hospital. So I opened the letter. The first sentence was quite a surprise: Dear Ms. Carol Peracchio: I am writing to notify you about a security breach that may have resulted in the unauthorized exposure of your personal information. The letter explained that a computer...

CurtMonash writes "The Indianapolis Star reports that Tuesday Morning, Methodist Hospital turned away patients in ambulances, for the first time in its 100-plus history. Why? Because the electronic health records (EHR) system had gone down the prior afternoon — due to a power surge — and the backlog of paperwork was no longer tolerable. If you think about that story, it has a couple of disturbing aspects. Clearly the investment in or design of high availability, surge protection, etc. were sadly lacking. But even leaving that aside — why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?...

FOR 20 years, I practiced pediatric medicine with a “paper chart.” I would sit with my young patients and their families, chart in my lap, making eye contact and listening to their stories. I could take patients’ histories in the order they wanted to tell them or as I wanted to ask. I could draw pictures of birthmarks, rashes or injuries. I loved how patients could participate in their own charts — illustrating their cognitive development as they went from showing me how they could draw a line at age 2 and a circle at 3 to proudly writing their...

A government-sponsored survey of the use of computerized patient records by physicians points to two seemingly contradictory conclusions, and a health care system at odds with itself. The report, published online on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that doctors who use electronic health records say overwhelmingly that they have helped improve the quality and timeliness of care. Yet fewer than one in five of the nation’s physicians have started using such records. Bringing patient records into the computer age, experts say, is crucial to improving care, reducing errors and containing costs in the American health care...