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GE Healthcare has launched Centricity Practice 10, a new version of the company’s practice-management software that allows physicians to monitor their progress toward qualifying for government financial incentives on meaningful use of EHRs (electronic health records).
CPS 10 is the only EHR and practice-management application that incorporates integrated quality reporting metrics, the company claims.
With EHR and practice-management features such as billing and revenue cycling combined in CPS 10, doctors and clinicians can integrate these components, along with quality reports, within the patient records themselves, according to GE. This integration allows practices to combine data on both the clinical and financial side, making the workflow more efficient and improving chances of qualifying for the government incentives, the company reports.
The practice-management part of the application adds easier scheduling, claims filing and billing modules with real-time monitoring capabilities.
With its ease of navigation, the interface of CPS 10 is similar to that of Microsoft Outlook, Don Sepulveda, senior marketing manager for GE Healthcare, told eWEEK. Panels separate essential information, and the navigation panel can collapse to expand a chart view.
“I think the new product is just more fluid. It’s easier to move around in the chart,” Barbara Watkins, an administrator at the Heart and Vascular Center of Arizona, told eWEEK. Fewer tabs in the new version also pleases Watkins. Her facility, a medium-size practice, participated in a pilot project for CPS 10.
Announced on July 12, the new version incorporates GE’s MQIC (Medical Quality Improvement Consortium) benchmarking data to allow doctors to compare their progress in reporting on patients’ conditions and outcomes. “Twenty million patient records allow our customers to do trending to see how they’re stacking up against their population and peers,” Sepulveda said.
Quality reporting allows administrators and physicians to track their performance against quality initiatives. Doctors and clinicians can view an Integrated Patient Scorecard indicating status, value and threshold.
Having the reporting capabilities integrated allows doctors to run the software from their desktop and directly view their scorecards on meaningful use rather than viewing separate reports created by administrators or other staff members, Watkins said.
“They can see who’s meeting it and not meeting it and see what’s going on with that particular document,” she said. “It’s good for the physicians to see it live rather than me handing it off to them or them coming to me to run the report for them.”
Essential documentation involves recording why a patient may not be able to take a specific medication, she explained.
“We’ve been using protocols forever. This is so much more effective because it’s in the patient’s chart,” Watkins said. “You can flip into the quality reporting.”
In viewing the quality reports, doctors have had some surprises, according to Watkins. Some doctors and nurse practitioners who believed they were ahead in certain quality criteria such as e-prescribing were just meeting the benchmark percentages instead. They can also evaluate whether blood pressure readings they’ve taken are in line with reasonable data.
In addition to offering EHR and practice-management components, GE launched a version of Centricity for researchers in March to boost the efficiency of clinical studies and improve research billing compliance.