The Direct Dispatch October Newsletter

The Direct Dispatch

A Newsletter For Healthcare Providers

October 2018

Greetings!

Read below for this month's exciting news from Direct Difference, Inc!

CMS Picks 7 Groups To Help Close Gaps in QPP Measures

Seven organizations were chosen by the CMS to improve and expand quality measures for Medicare's Quality Payment Program. The CMS said the groups, which will work on the areas of orthopedic surgery, pathology, radiology, mental health and substance use, oncology and palliative care, will fill in gaps in the QPP measure set.

Healthcare Dive

Experts Suggest Ways To Improve EHR Systems

Medical practices are advised to provide adequate EHR training for physicians, seek help from physicians in EHR development and clinical workflow design, and establish an EHR governance process, according to a white paper released by the Stanford University School of Medicine. The document also recommends presenting data in a user-friendly format, reducing clinician burden by offloading non-essential EHR tasks to other staff, and allowing patients to digitally maintain their EHRs.

EHR Intelligence

Quality Reporting Center Upcoming Events

Did you miss the FY 2019 IPPS Acute Care Hospital Final Rule Webinar? Visit the quality reporting center to view the archived event and earn 1.5 C.E.

Second Quarter (2Q) 2018 Population and Sampling data submission deadline for hospitals participating in the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) Program is Thursday, November 1, 2018, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time.

The submission period for second quarter (2Q) 2018 Perinatal Care Elective Delivery Measure (PC-01) data is October 1 through November 15, 2018.

The CMS Abstraction and Reporting Tool (CART)-Inpatient Version 4.21 is now available on the QualityNet website ( http://www.qualitynet.org ).

This release contains updates to CART-Inpatient related to Sepsis and ICD-10 code modifications to Appendix A, to support Version 5.4a of the Specifications Manual for National Hospital Inpatient Quality Measures.

Installation instructions, edits, and online help are located on the QualityNet website. On the Hospitals – Inpatient drop-down box, select Data Collection (& CART) . Then, select CART Downloads & Info . CART installation instructions are provided on the web page. The Edits document and Online Help Guide are at the bottom of the page under Resources. The CART-Inpatient Version 4.21 can be accessed under CART Downloads & Info by selecting Version 4.21 for Discharges 07/01/2018–12/31/2018 in the drop-down box.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) developed and published the 2019 reporting period electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) flows for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs) to the eCQI Resource Center . This is a new resource for eligible hospital and CAH eCQMs for the 2019 reporting period, developed in response to stakeholder feedback.

Do You Know All The Service We Provide?

Measuring quality is necessary for improving healthcare. We understand that when providers are overly consumed with measuring and reporting quality metrics, it is difficult to actually apply results and focus on actions that lead to real improvements.

Why not smart source all of your data abstraction needs so that it is done better, faster, more consistently, and at lower cost with less risk?

Did you know we provide abstraction services for core measures, non-core measures, registry, OPPE-FPPE, NHSN, peer review, pharmaceutical studies and others? If you have any data abstraction needs please contact us for more information. All you have to do is respond to this email to get started.

You can also visit our website for more information!

ACTION Registry Changes

ACTION Registry is now Chest Pain/MI Registry Version 3 and training has begun! Initial training focused on inclusion criteria and data definitions. There will be a repeat of these sessions on October 11 ^th .

Premier will now be called Full. Limited will now be called Basic. There is one tool for both. The yellow sections on the tool are the Limited/Basic. The complete tool is used for Premier/Full. Also the same tool is used for all patient types in the populations submitted.

Facilities have the ability now to collect their Chest Pain Low Risk Populations for Chest Pain Accreditation via the NCDR data tool; however they can continue to use the ACC tool as well.

If you have any questions or concerns about these changes please contact your account manager or respond directly to this email.

Gone Phishing

Training your employees to recognize a phishing campaign just got a whole lot harder. A new phishing attack targeting Microsoft’s popular Office 365 platform has impacted roughly 10 percent of its users globally … and that’s just an estimate. What makes it more problematic is that the attackers are harvesting usernames and passwords under the guise of document sharing via SharePoint.