Quality Alliance recommends ELINCS and LOINC as a Lab Results Solution

Recommendation: Promote adoption and use of technical coding/terminology and lab data interchange standards.

•A collaborative of public and private organizations is needed to identify a “starter set” of LOINC® codes for the top 200–300 lab test codes in use across the country and to promote its broad adoption and use.
•A large-scale collaboration between ONC, the National Library of Medicine, and private sector organizations should strongly encourage the adoption and use of standards, such as LOINC® and the EHR-Lab Interoperability and Connectivity Specification (ELINCS), that align with standards supporting health IT and meaningful use.
•Medicare and commercial contracts should make incentives available to lab vendors to adopt and use LOINC®.

Full Report is available here.

2011 Listing of Laboratory to Physician Office Link Software

Every year CAP Today magazine posts a listing of the leading vendors for Physician office link software. This year there are 23 vendors.

Click here to view vendor listing.

SmartlinkEMR Saves Staff Time

SmartlinkEMR in action at a physician practice in Carmel, Indiana.

At this implementation, the application aggregates reports from the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics into a single database providing a one stop Patient Diagnostics Information System. Office staff are able to find patient reports in seconds instead of many minutes saving them chunks of time throughout the day.

The time savings from office staff is incredible as they report at least two to three hours saved in each workday.

ELINCS Lab Orders Specification Released for Public Comment

In March 2011 the California HealthCare Foundation, in collaboration with a multi-stakeholder group, completed a draft version of the ELINCS Orders specification. Public comments were accepted through April 11, 2011. The final specification will be published in summer 2011.
Click here to view the draft specification.

Lab quality law permits data exchange, CMS says

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) yesterday clarified that a 1988 law setting up national quality standards for medical testing labs does permit the labs to electronically exchange test data, an essential feature of the administration’s health IT adoption plan.

In issuing guidelines on the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA), CMS aimed to clear up confusion about the impact of the law on fledgling health information exchanges and networks.

“We have the concern that the interpretation of CLIA has sometimes stood in the way of easy info exchange,” said Dr. David Blumenthal in remarks made yesterday at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society annual conference in Atlanta.

In some cases, for instance, providers said they believed the law permitted only physicians who ordered a test to receive the results, according to hearings conducted last year by a panel of the Health IT Policy Committee, which advises Blumenthal.

In its revised guidance, CMS said lab results could be sent to the ordering physician as well as others designated by the physician. That includes providing patients access to their lab data unless a state specifically prohibits it, CMS said.

full article here...

Do or Die: Clinical Laboratories Must Invest to Build Up LIS-EMR Interfaces with Physicians Offices

Experts predict a surge in the number of physicians using electronic medical record systems

By dangling as much as $20 billion in front of physicians to encourage their adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems during the next few years, Congress has created a new and expensive challenge for the nation’s clinical laboratories. That challenge is the need for every pathology laboratory to establish a high-function interface from its LIS to the office-based physician’s EMR.

http://www.darkdaily.com/clinical-pathology-labs-face-an-increasing-need-to-interface-with-electronic-medical-records-emr-119


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ONC delays lab standards

Meaningful use still remains a mystery after Tuesday's Health IT Policy Committee meeting and standards for electronic laboratory orders have been pushed off until next month.

David Blumenthal, MD, the national coordinator for health IT, asked the advisory Health IT Policy Committee to defer until January a decision on whether to allow temporary variations in those standards to be used.

The policy committee had recommended providers start using in 2011 a single set of national standards for communicating electronically with labs, one of the tenets of the administration’s meaningful use policy to encourage the use of health IT.

http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/onc-delays-lab-standards