>I think this would be a great 3rd tier "bonus" requirement for a PIP review >next year, and would make the "I" in PIP a bit more relevant. My current >feeling is that the requirements in their current form have manifested >themselves as a reward for practices that have been proactive with their IT >systems over the past few years, and have acted as a disincentive for many >small practices who haven't kept up.
I believe many have lost sight of the fact that many if not most PIP practices received a 'one-off' payment of several thousand dollars in May, 2003 to 'prepare' themselves for capacity for better data capture and use; known as PIP Electronic Health Records Payment. This was to be followed up with a similar payment in November, 2004 but that was superceded by the Broadband For Health funding (always a contentious issue with me as I believe it short changed far more practices this way). So, for 2 1/2 yrs, my mantra at every practice visit and in every newsletter in the Divisions I was associated with, was 3 key pieces of clinical information needed to be in the ehr - allergies (or not), diagnoses and medications. Not limited to these of course but this would be absolute minimum. And then B4H came along and the GPCG Security Guidelines, and the mantra changed to include all of the relevant security issues (albeit I had been harping on this for years already). So, those practices have no excuse for not being able to qualify for both tiers - they have had 3 1/2 yrs to enter the data for active patients and need only show it for the past 2 years and only need to show for a 'majority' of patients, at that. Another term wide open to interpretation, I am sure. One person's majority may be 51% while another's may be 98%. I suppose for any practice who received that initial payment, the new PIP is their followup reward they didn't get in 2004 and a better one at that for $7 per SWPE at average 1000 per year, a typical 3 FTE GP practice will rake in $21,000. (Except for those practices with luddites, as Liz describes, what a bummer). In my experience, it's the smaller practices who were better able to prepare, not having so many luddites to convert. And, I still say, that if you're receiving Pathology downloads, this is 'transfer' of electronic data and since it's secure, you should be able to tick the Tier 1 box. But thank you Simon for persevering with MA on this and I await a final interpretation from the horse's mouth with bated breath. Regards, Jan _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
