CSC Health Services Insights

Health Benefit Exchanges will provide a reliable source of consumer and purchaser information and education, an online marketplace, and a “one stop” clearinghouse for eligibility verification and enrollment.

Update on Stage 2: Recommendations by the HIT Policy Committee on requirements for Stage 2 Meaningful Use.

CSC creates first Online Community dedicated to Meaningful Use: This new community can be a valuable resource of information and ready, interactive exchange of ideas, insight and expertise.

CSC Bylined Articles

Read some of our recent articles in the media.

Provider Industry Insights

Moving Ahead with Stage 2 of Meaningful Use The experience with Stage 1 of Meaningful Use indicates that capabilities to coordinate care and engage patients will remain as challenges in Stage 2.
Ten Principles for Hospitals to Align Meaningful Use with Healthcare Reform As reimbursement transitions from rewarding volume to rewarding performance, healthcare reform is defining the performance expectations for the future at the same time that the HITECH EHR incentive program is available to help build the IT foundation for that future. The challenge is to be sure that today’s work on HITECH is aligned with the future requirements. This paper presents ten principles to help hospitals do just that.
The Hospital Agenda for Accountability Regardless of the ultimate provisions for the ACO program, hospitals that treat Medicare patients are already involved with accountable care, thanks to three other CMS programs that tie Medicare reimbursement rates to measured performance. This white paper reviews the resulting quality improvement agenda and priorities.
Should Healthcare Organizations Use Social Media? Social media offers an important way for key healthcare stakeholders to connect with and engage consumers, to influence customers and accomplish numerous strategic healthcare goals by going to where people are. Your organization cannot afford to take a “wait-and-see” approach or you may soon find yourself trying to catch up with competitors.
Preparing for Accountable Care: The Role of Health IT in Building Capability Even if creating an ACO for the Medicare Shared Savings Program proves impossible, every healthcare delivery organization should be developing the clinical information systems and point of care decision support, master data management, health information exchange, patient engagement, care management and coordination, and performance management capabilities to deliver accountable care in order to ensure near-term and long-term clinical and financial success.
Achieving Comprehensive Health IT Privacy and Security Privacy and security are mission-critical issues now that the proposed changes to HIPAA are about to be finalized and now that a risk assessment is required to achieve meaningful use. There are many new and changing rules to comply with, but fortunately the rules represent best practices that should be a part of an organization’s privacy and security strategy. In this paper, CSC provides a status update on three HIPAA-related topics: accounting of disclosures, encryption, and two-factor authentication. Then the authors describe the basic steps involved in completing a risk assessment.
Harnessing the Value of mHealth for Your Organization The next generation of mHealth is the synergistic combination of smart device, value-add capabilities and innovative apps that are already supplementing or even replacing traditional healthcare tasks.
Preparing for Accountable Care: The Role of Health IT in Engaging Patients As healthcare organizations become more accountable for the care they provide, engaging patients in their health, wellness and medical decisions will be increasingly important. A healthcare organization's ability to engage patients will be enabled through the use of four dimensions of health IT tools.
Performance-Based Reimbursement Update A proposed rule concerning the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) adds to the information available about how CMS is increasingly tying Medicare Part A reimbursement for hospital inpatient services to measured quality performance. This document summarizes what is proposed for four different IPPS pay-for-performance programs: Inpatient Quality Reporting, Hospital-Acquired Conditions Payment Limitation, Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, and the Value-Based Purchasing Program.
Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Update: Overview of the CMS Final Rule Established under the Affordable Care Act of 2010, the Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program seeks to transition Medicare toward a closer link between payment and quality. This white paper summarizes how the program will work and outlines what's at stake for hospitals going forward.
HIT Roadmap to Safety, Quality and Efficiency The CSC HIT Roadmap to Safety, Quality and Efficiency provides routes to meeting the hospital requirements for HITECH meaningful use in Stage 1 in a safe and efficient manner, and so that the effort provides a solid foundation for the future.
A Roadmap for eHealth: The Route to Deliver 21st Century Healthcare A Roadmap for eHealth: The Route to Deliver 21st Century Healthcare
Using Tracking Tools to Improve Patient Flow in Hospitals New patient tracking technologies allow hospitals to increase their service capacity by enabling caregivers to work more efficiently. This report examines the technologies that are available, the best practices for implementation, and the benefits that these solutions yield. The report includes five brief case summaries.
Opinion Article: Has Telemedicine Reached Its Tipping Point? Opinion Article
Personal Health Records: A True "Personal Health Record"? Not Really ... Not Yet. A true personal health record (PHR) needs to be comprehensive, interactive, patient-controlled and secure. Without major changes in behavior and dramatic increases in adoption of technology though, a true PHR – and the benefits associated with it – will not be possible.
eHealth Entering Era of "Normality" eHealth Entering Era of "Normality"
Next Generation Quality Management Truly improving hospital performance requires accomplishing measurement of quality performance in real time – for real patients – and notifying the responsible clinicians with actionable information. This requires blurring the traditional boundaries between the clinical systems that clinicians use and the systems that assemble patient information and analyze performance.
Cloud Computing in the Healthcare Environment Cloud computing is a new computing model that lets organizations treat their IT infrastructure as a service. In this paper, CSC describes the various types of cloud computing and examines five “promises” that are often heard in the marketplace today. The authors also outline what steps healthcare organizations should be taking now to prepare themselves to benefit from using the cloud.
Physician Quality Reporting: The Hidden Requirements of Meaningful Use A typical set of eligible professional quality measures for HITECH for a health system or large medical group were deconstructed into unique data elements in order to analyze the data capture required to meet the quality reporting requirement of meaningful use. Even with the data available in basic registration and encounter management, and the added data from the core functional requirements for Stage 1, only 48 percent of the needs will be met. The remainder of the data elements are the hidden requirements of meaningful use.
EHR Certification for Meaningful Use The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at the relationship between certification and meaningful use under the temporary EHR certification program and to outline what products need to be certified – and how they need to be used.
Five Tips for a Successful EHR Implementation The following tips by Fletcher Allen Health Care and CSC will help ensure a smooth EHR implementation.
Meaningful Use for Hospitals: The Top Ten Challenges The HITECH provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provide an estimated $45 billion dollars for the adoption and use of Health Information Technology (HIT) by Medicare and Medicaid providers over the next ten years. To receive the financial incentives, eligible physicians and hospitals must achieve "meaningful use" of an electronic health record (EHR). Understandably, much attention is now focused on meaningful use; what it is and how to get there. In this paper, CSC first reviews meaningful use as defined for the hospital and then the top ten challenges that hospitals need to focus on and master to achieve truly meaningful use.
Hospital Quality Reporting: The Hidden Requirements in Meaningful Use When the 15 hospital quality measures for HITECH meaningful use were deconstructed into the unique data elements, even hospitals with core systems such as reg/ADT and laboratory who have met the explicit data capture requirements for HITECH Stage 1 (CPOE for medications, problem list, etc.) will only have 35 percent of the data needed for the hospital measures. These are the hidden requirements of meaningful use.
Health Reform: Priorities and Challenges for Hospital Executives CSC surveyed executives responsible for 250 hospitals to determine their priorities in preparing for the next wave of changes in health delivery. Although the immediate priority was qualifying for meaningful use payments, executives were also preparing for success under accountable care. IT executives were almost exclusively focused on meeting meaningful use, but operational executives had different top priorities.
U.S. Healthcare Workforce Shortages: HIT A challenge facing the health care industry today and in the near future is growing workforce shortages. A product of industry growth and demands for reform, it includes growing shortages of both caregivers and health care information technology workers.
U.S. Healthcare Workforce Shortages: Caregivers A challenge facing the health care industry today and in the near future is growing workforce shortages. A product of both industry growth and demands for reform, one example is the growing shortage of caregivers that threatens to reduce care access available to current, new and patients residing in underserved areas and neighborhoods.
Meaningful Use for Eligible Professionals: The Top Ten Challenges Eligible professionals (ambulatory care clinic providers) who expect to share American Recovery and Reimbursement Act of 2009 (ARRA) stimulus incentives for using electronic health records (EHRs) must meet EHR meaningful use criteria to qualify. These criteria, develop by the ONC and enforced by CMS, cover numerous functions, features, and processes that are part of EHR use, and meeting them will be a challenge both to eligible professionals that are still without an EHR (the majority), and those that already have an EHR (almost all of which need upgrades to meet meaningful use criteria).
Integrating EHRs: Hospital Trends and Strategies for Initiating Integrated EHRs Within Their Communities A growing trend at U.S. hospitals and health care systems preparing for health reform and other industry change anticipated during the next 5 years is initiating use of integrated electronic health records (EHRs) within their hospital and physician practice communities. These communities need integrated EHRs to meet HITECH Act meaningful use criteria, coordinate care of patients who cross care venues, streamline hospital-practice workflows, and address health reform initiatives.
Ministries of Health - How to Make Their IT Agenda Work Ministries of Health - How to Make Their IT Agenda Work
Technology Cornerstones Supporting Tomorrow's Healthcare Critical health information can now be delivered to authorized end users regardless of time, place or device. The technologies discussed in this paper improve data access and data interoperability, enable personalized interactions, and provide ubiquitous computing.
Creating a Financially Sustainable Health Information Exchange Statewide Health Information Exchanges take more than public funding to be financially sustainable in the long-term.
Tomorrow's Healthcare System Using Today's Technology Technology is no longer the barrier to quality patient-centric care; it is here and available today. It is the practice of healthcare that needs to change to make this a reality, hopefully greatly enabled by healthcare coverage and financing reform.
U.S. Health Care in the Year 2015 The U.S. health care industry is at a crossroads in 2009 and the next five years promise to be a time of upheaval and transformation as the entire industry redefines itself to deliver health care that is safe, effective, and high quality to enough people at a sustainable cost. The magnitude of these changes will affect every sector of the U.S. health care economy and providers, hospitals, and payer organizations that anticipate, prepare for and embrace these changes are the ones that will survive and succeed.
Towards Coordinated Care: Healthcare Payment Reform Proposals for healthcare payment reform represent a transition to a system that ties reimbursement to high-quality, tightly coordinated care. In this paper, we outline the four underlying concepts behind payment reform proposals and discuss how provider organizations can prepare for these new models.
The Massachusetts Health Connector: Lessons Learned from the Builders of the Health Insurance Exchange The Massachusetts health insurance exchange features an interactive website that educates consumers on state law and enables them to browse and purchase affordable health insurance. In this paper, CSC details the lessons learned from designing and implementing a health insurance exchange for the state, including customer service and consumer outreach, and offers recommendations for those involved in similar efforts across the country.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) offers data and access security, HIPAA compliance and end-user flexibility that are increasingly important to hospitals. Successful implementations can be done within a few months yielding a quantifiable ROI in less than one year.
HITECH's Impact on Health Information Exchanges: Key Decision Points for Privacy and Security Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) enable authorized caregivers, patients, public health authorities, and other providers to share electronic patient health information across different settings and geographical areas. In this paper, we describe the key decision points related to HIE privacy and security, and explain the relevance and impact of the new provisions and requirements contained in the HITECH Act.
Accomplishing EHR/HIE (eHealth): Lessons from Europe The U.S. is poised to make substantial progress in implementing EHRs and HIEs to support healthcare reform. Our experiences in helping Denmark, The Netherlands, and three regions in the UK implement their eHealth solutions provide guidance and shared experiences for U.S. efforts.
Large-Scale eHealth Initiatives: Decision Points and Best Practices Large-Scale eHealth initiatives are needed to support healthcare reform programs to lower costs and improve care and access. Our experiences in Europe and the U.S. have identified the top decision points, best practices, and lessons learned.
CPOE: Getting Order Management Right To achieve meaningful use and qualify for HITECH stimulus incentives, hospitals today must get CPOE right the first time in a smooth, timely transition. Achieving this requires getting order management right.
The Leapfrog Group's CPOE Evaluation Tool This paper provides a look at a CPOE Evaluation Tool pilot program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
Evaluating CT Capacity Using Space Productivity™ Instead of expanding capacity through the purchase of additional equipment or an extension of operating hours, what if your current CT scanners could be used more efficiently to increase throughput and capacity?
Getting Value from IT This paper identifies the characteristics of effective IT governance structures and processes and provides steps for starting the journey to a more agile and results-oriented IT governance program. In addition, case summaries show five health care organizations at various levels of IT governance maturity.
Value-Based Purchasing: Non-Payment for Hospital-Acquired Conditions The CMS HAC (hospital-acquired condition) payment adjustment provision requires hospitals to report POA (present on admission) conditions with Medicare claims, potentially reduces Medicare claims payments, and is forcing hospitals to modify care delivery and documentation practices. It is also being considered for adoption by other payers and is contributing to overall VBP (value-based purchasing) initiatives in healthcare.
Core Measures: All About the Data Having the patient-specific information required for core measures in electronic form not only benefits quality reporting, but also enables real-time quality management. The finding that much of the information needed for medical and surgical core measures must be derived from physician documentation suggests that hospitals may want to reconsider the typical sequencing of electronic physician documentation late in the EHR roll-out.
Next Generation Patient Self-Care This paper describes the broad categories of technologies that support patient self-care including examples of successful implementations. It concludes with a discussion of changing stakeholder roles and responsibilities and critical success factors needed to enable widespread adoption.
Saving Lives, Saving Money In Practice: Strategies for Computerized Physician Order Entry in Massachusetts Hospitals The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative contracted with researchers at CSC to compile hospital experiences with supporting the users and the application following the initial rollout of CPOE throughout the hospital. The topics addressed in the report include: ongoing user support, optimizing CPOE, ongoing management of order sets and clinical decision support, CPOE and medication reconciliation, and downtime procedures.
Adoption of Advanced Clinical Systems in Massachusetts Hospitals Analysis of a 2008 survey looking at adoption of advanced clinical systems in Massachusetts hospitals.
Touchscreen Check-In: Kiosks Speed Hospital Registration Self-service kiosks increase patient satisfaction and improve operational efficiency by giving patients a convenient way to check in, register for services, pay co-payments and update their personal information. In this report, commissioned by the California HealthCare Foundation, CSC describes how hospital ambulatory and emergency departments are using kiosks and provides a list of best practices for implementation.
Moving Medication Safety to the Next Plateau Ensuring that the organization has the capacity to achieving safer medication practices will require building the commitment, culture, executive leadership and management processes that are up to the task.
E-Prescribing and Its Expanding Role in Healthcare Electronic prescribing is about to become a significant preoccupation of healthcare providers, payers and pharmacies for the next several years.
Next Generation Inpatient Care Hospitals need to prepare for the growing gap between the need for care and the people and facilities available to respond to that increasing demand. Several hospitals have developed solutions to meet these future challenges and there is a growing body of knowledge for others to follow.
Equipped for Efficiency: Improving Nursing Care Through Technology Nursing staff are the backbone of healthcare delivery and are at the center of communications between patients, care giving staff and auxiliary services.
Treatment Plan: Hospitals Respond to the Economic Crisis We interviewed 54 hospital and health system executives to understand what plans they have to respond to the crisis, and where they stand in implementing those plans.
Next Generation Ambulatory Care Serious challenges, including primary care and specialist physician shortages, rising costs, and the misalignment of reimbursement, resources and quality of care, are forcing healthcare providers, payers and industry regulators to transition to a next generation of ambulatory care.
Health Information Exchanges: Future Prospects, Current Realities Interest in Health Information Exchange (HIE) remains high. Sustainable solutions solve an existing business problem and provide benefits to multiple stakeholders in the community.
Patient-Centeredness Patient centeredness is the commitment to provide care that respects patients' needs, wants, and preferences, while engaging them to participate in their own care. On-line portals, personalized health education, and patient flow systems can raise patient satisfaction and make care more patient-focused.
Effective Use of Medication-Related Decision Support in CPOE The Leapfrog CPOE standard expects that the CDS tools in CPOE are aggressively applied to avoid potential adverse events that can be detected at ordering. It requires that physicians are entering most orders directly and benefiting from the safety net provided by CDS.
Bridging the Care Gap: Using Web Technology for Patient Referrals (California HealthCare Foundation) To address a major care gap, a growing number of safety net organizations--community clinics and public health systems--are using new Web-based applications to support arranging referral or follow-up care for their patients. A growing number of commercial vendors is providing Web-based applications for this purpose, and some organizations have developed their own applications. Evidence is accumulating that the IT-enabled process is a win-win for patients, referring providers, and receiving providers and that the recommended care happens more consistently.
Responding to Recovery Audit Contractors Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs) seek out improper payments made to hospitals as part of the Medicare fee-for-service program. To prepare for RACs, organizations need to take immediate corrective actions to identify and fix overpayment claims and to prevent future errors from occurring.
Accountability and Transparency: Building the Information Foundation for Demonstrating Performance Excellence Regulatory agencies, payers, and consumers are demanding more information about outcomes and costs as a means to make providers more accountable for their performance. The ultimate goal is to capture the needed data as part of care delivery and analyze it using a health intelligence solution.
The Multi-Generational Healthcare IT Workforce Four distinct generations make up the healthcare IT workforce. Healthcare IT management needs to understand the generations and preapre for unique challenges from each, including how to minimize loss of expertise from retiring traditionalist and boomers, prepare GenXers for management, and recruit GenYers.
The Leapfrog Group’s CPOE Standard and Evaluation Tool The Leapfrog Group’s CPOE Standard and Evaluation Tool Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare - July/August 2008
Next Generation Safety Net The current focus of clinical Information Technology in the hospital is advanced clinical applications, including nursing and physician documentation, electronic medication administration record (eMAR), and computerized physician order entry (CPOE). These applications provide the foundation for more reliable, efficient, and effective care.
Next Generation Efficiency Increasing demand for health services coupled with shortages of skilled care providers are leading organizations to focus on significantly improving operations. Today's technology helps the hospital workforce to maximize productivity by eliminating work tasks, providing a "helping hand" to get work done more quickly, and allowing the patient to complete some tasks.
Evolution Framework: Assessing Progress on the Journey to Organizational Excellence Care needs to continually evolve to be safer, more efficient and patient centered and more accountable. We report on the progress 27 leading organization are making to change technology and processes to respond to this challenge.
Connecting Community Physicans IT options hospitals and IDNs can employ to connect affiliated physician practices include portals, integration, hosted EHRs, and HIE. No one strategy is correct for every hospital and/or practice.
Telemedicine in the Ambulatory Setting Early adopters of telemedicine have demonstrated that technologies such as remote monitoring and tele-consultations improve access to care, increase efficiency, and effectively manage patients with chronic diseases. Telemedicine will be a part of mainstream medical care in the future.
Health Intelligence for Performance-Driven Hospitals Hospitals are faced with enormous data reporting and performance benchmark pressures to effectively manage the business of health care. New health intelligence applications satisfy the growing need by providing the ability to analyze data from multiple systems and across clinical, financial and operational dimensions.

Payer Industry Insights

Preparing for Accountable Care: Aligning Patient and Provider Incentives Healthcare cost inflation in the United States is out of control, and cost reduction efforts to transform traditional practices and incentives tend to focus exclusively either on the patient side or on the provider side of the cost equation. The real opportunity for transformation lies in bringing these efforts together – aligning patient and provider incentives for common activities, practices and behaviors in pursuit of the common goal of improved quality, improved outcomes and lower overall cost.
Health Benefit Exchanges: Seamless Enrollment and Affordable Coverage The State Exchanges in the ACA will take a variety of forms that reflect local conditions and policy preferences, but the basic challenges of eligibility verification, integration, coordination and alignment between public and private sector participants and mandated requirements will be similar in every instance.
Health Insurance Cooperatives: A Real Reform Alternative? The Consumer Oriented and Operated Plans (CO-OPs) created under health care reform legislation will have the advantage of sponsorship under the Affordable Care Act and funding for start up costs and capital requirements, but they will still face the fundamental barriers to entry that make the U.S. health insurance market so challenging, and will only succeed if they are able to learn from the history and market experience of existing cooperative health insurance plans.
Health Insurance Exchanges in Health Care Reform: Five Things Builders Should Know The Health Insurance Exchanges that will be implemented for national health care reform will provide consumers and small businesses with a secure online marketplace for the comparison and selection of health insurance coverage. Implementing them will be a significant undertaking, and the builders of these new exchanges should build on the lessons learned in Massachusetts where the Commonwealth Connector was created in 2007 to support state-wide health care reform.
Meaningful Use for Health Plans: Five Things to Consider Demonstrating the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) is more than just a high priority for hospitals and physicians seeking to capture HITECH Act incentives. It iss a critical success factor for health plans and payers in the effort to succeed during an era of healthcare reform.
ICD-10 Implementation: Objects on the Horizon Are Closer Than You Think The deadlines for ICD-10 implementation may seem far in the future, but the business process and technology challenges are significant and organizations must complete assessment and planning activities soon in order to ensure that they have a remediation plan that balances near term regulatory compliance with long term business value realization.
Integrated Health Management Health plans must transform their approach to medical cost management in order to make it effective, and deliver sustained high-quality care at an acceptable cost by employing integrated health management competencies within the context of an end-to-end wellness management lifecycle.
Beyond Premium Billing: End-to-End Revenue Management for Health Plans Reducing overhead costs and improving the operation of the premium billing function as one component in an end-to-end revenue management process is a critical success factor as health plans face an almost perfect storm of difficult business conditions.
Best Practices to Face Medicare Beneficiary Information Challenge Private Medicare plans that implement best practices in the three key process areas of enrollment, eligibility updates and reconciliation can enhance their financial performance by increasing premiums and reducing costs.
Medicare Part D: Get Ready for Changes Changes coming to Medicare Part D will bring fundamental changes to drug development and pricing. Life sciences companies who are lean, truly innovative, and build a compelling business case for each product will succeed.
Health Insurance Reform in Massachusetts In April 2006, Massachusetts enacted landmark healthcare legislation that was designed to ensure all residents in the state had health insurance. This paper looks at what happened – and what didn’t happen – as a result of the law.
Next Generation Health Plan The Four “C’s” of cost, capacity constraints, coverage expansion and changing roles are powerful forces transforming all of healthcare, creating conditions for the Next Generation Health Plan to maximize operational efficiency, systematically address the cost of healthcare, partner with providers and adopt a value-based retail orientation to healthcare.
Mandatory Medicare Secondary Payer Reporting New rules from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) make Medicare Secondary Payer (MSP) status reporting mandatory in 2009 – creating significant new data and administrative requirements backed by significant financial penalties for health plans and payers. Deadlines are imminent, and data quality initiatives will be critical to long term success.
Adoption of Electronic Health Record Capabilities in Massachusetts Physician Practices Analysis of a 2008 survey looking at adoption of electronic health record capabilities by Massachusetts physicians.
Medicare Advantage: Time to Brace for a Change This whitepaper provides an overview of the Medicare Advantage program and offers direction for Medicare Advantage plans in light of anticipated policy changes. Demands for reform have increased in recent months, particularly with respect to the costs associated with the Medicare Advantage program, and private sector plans that offer Medicare Advantage products need to prepare now in order to succeed in the future.
Responding to ICD-10: Healthcare Payer Strategy to Achieve Regulatory Compliance and ROI This whitepaper provides an overview of the upcoming regulatory requirement for healthcare payers to adopt ICD-10. A regulation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is mandating an aggressive implementation timeline for healthcare payers to upgrade to ICD-10 diagnosis and procedure codes to replace version ICD-9 in HIPAA transactions. This paper discusses costs and potential gains of ICD-10 implementation, and provides a recommended work approach to achieve compliance and optimize benefits.
Insuring the Future: Health Plans Respond to the Financial Crisis This paper provides an overview of findings from a November 2008 survey of 30 health plan executives about the impact of the current financial downturn on their business.
Medicare Part D: Time for a Checkup This white paper provides an overview of the Medicare Part D program as it enters its fourth year.
Pay-for-Performance Pay for Performance programs (where providers are paid to meet quality metrics) have reached the mainstream. To compete, Health Plans need to have a plan with meaningful incentives, accurate and timely feedback to providers, and incentives for IT adoption.

Life Sciences Industry Insights

Scrip Regulatory Affairs Publication: Getting Closer to Regulatory Harmony in a Shrinking Pharma World Gill King and Joel Finkle explore some of the key developments relating among other things to document submission that have taken place over the past year in major pharmaceutical markets and what those developments mean for the industry.
EVMPD Requirements - Pharma Market Europe (January 2012 edition) The new regulation has caught many in the industry off guard and the European Medicines Agency has given companies just months to respond to this mandate, one of the most expansive regulatory reforms in decades.
e-Clinical Avatars and Personalized Medicine Disease Networks Human Disease Network: The Rosetta Stone of Genomic Medicine: Artificial Life, Synthetic Genome, Semantic Maps of Medicine
Life Sciences: Entering the Cloud By embracing cloud computing, life sciences companies can increase speed to market, improve collaboration and make IT costs more predictable.
Master Data Management and Life Sciences A successful Life Sciences Master Data Management (MDM) strategy depends on governance, targeted investment, the use of mission specific MDM tools.
Networking R&D: Using Broad-Based Collaboration to Optimize Life Sciences Research New ways of connecting biomedical researchers will completely alter the landscape of Life Sciences R&D. Broad-Based research collaboration will speed effective new treatments to patients and improve Life Sciences development outcomes.
Controlled Collaboration: A More Productive and User-Centric Approach to Electronic Document Review New technologies have emerged enabling controlled document collaboration that help life science organizations improve productivity while driving compliance across functional areas and with external business partners.
The Next Generation of R&D: Patient-Centric and Semantically Connected The "Blockbuster" era of pharmaceutical R&D is ending. Next generation R&D will use completely new tools to bring targeted therapies and diagnostics to specific patient groups.
Future of Enterprise Content Management in Life Sciences New XML authoring and collaboration tools will combine with robust document management to bring the next generation of ECM to life sciences enterprises.
Managing Information as a Strategic Asset in Life Sciences Managing Information as a Strategic Asset in Life Sciences

HITECH: CSC's Point of View

Update on Stage 2: Current Direction and Timing of Meaningful Use Requirements This white paper looks at the recommendations made by the HIT Policy Committee on requirements for Stage 2 of meaningful use.
Summary of Preliminary Stage 2 Meaningful Use Requirements and Recommendations for Providers This white paper looks at the recommendations made by the HIT Policy Committee on requirements for Stage 2 of meaningful use.
Update on Certification: The Final Rule In order to receive Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments for Meaningful Use of an EHR, hospitals and physician practices must be using a "certified" EHR product. The criteria for certification directly support the requirements for Meaningful Use, interoperability, and privacy and security. The temporary certification program is well underway. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Care IT has also issued the final requirements for a permanent certification program that starts in January of 2012.
Update on Privacy, Security and Enforcement Many new requirements have been adopted (or proposed) in the past year with regard to patient health information privacy and security regulatory requirements. In this white paper, we describe these changes and present five recommendations on how organizations can begin to adjust for changes in the areas of privacy, security and enforcement.
Update on Meaningful Use: The Final Rule Healthcare organizations need to start now to achieve meaningful use of EHRs and receive the maximum incentive payments.
Update on Incentives: The Final Rule A closer look at the incentives available to providers for achieving meaningful use, including details from final rule issued by CMS on July 13, 2010.
Update on Standards: The Final Rule On July 13, 2010, CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology issued a final rule completing the adoption of an initial set of standards and implementation specifications. The rule describes the standards to which an EHR must adhere in order to meet the criteria for Certified Electronic Health Record (EHR) Technology.
Update on Quality Measurement and Reporting: The Final Rule The final rule on meaningful use for the HITECH program issued on July 13, 2010 lowered the bar in terms of the number of quality measures for hospitals and eligible professionals, but reaffirmed many aspects of this part of meaningful use as laid out in the interim rule.
Survey Report: Are Hospitals Ready for Meaningful Use of EHRs? The HITECH Act has set aside $36 billion in Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments to physicians in ambulatory practices and hospitals for the meaningful use of certified Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs). We asked executives at 58 hospitals across the U.S. a series of 50 questions to evaluate their readiness to meet the criteria for receiving incentives. We found that most hospitals are only about half-way toward meeting the requirements of meaningful use, and only one quarter meet at least 70 percent of the readiness indicators.
Money Back from Your Downpayment on HIT The U.S. is anticipating major health reform over the next several years. Many aspects of the reform debate remain unsettled, and interpretations vary on their chances of being implemented and having an effect. There seems to be only one thing that all participants and policy makers tend to agree on – from government, to employers, health plans, providers and consumers - more and better use of information technology in health care is essential.
HITECH Advice to Clients The HITECH provisions of the stimulus bill provide up to $30 billion in incentive payments for "Meaningful Use" of EHRs. This white paper provides advice on how to get started to make sure you qualify for the incentive payments.

Global Studies

Telemedicine: An Essential Technology for Reformed Healthcare Health reform is creating the alignment of care practices with incentives, and breaking down traditional barriers to position telemedicine as an enabler for addressing current healthcare challenges.
Real-World Data Research: A Case for Action The increasing use of real-world data by decision makers across the healthcare continuum is driving the need for real-world data research competencies within life science companies.

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