Friday, July 27, 2012

Information Week on Kalorama Patient Monitoring

We expect fast revenue growth in patient monitoring systems that have advanced features such as remote and wireless capability and in this interview with our analyst Melissa Elder in Information Week, in a story on remote patient monitoring the point was made clear.  These systems are growing as organizations seek to streamline operations, save money and comply with EMR requirements.

Patient-involved healthcare is on the rise and wireless technologies have catered to this trend," Elder said in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. "Some of the challenges [at healthcare delivery organizations] can be somewhat offset by implementing newer patient monitoring technologies capable of not only monitoring patients, but sorting data, and automatically updating patient records. This allows health staff to provide care more efficiently and also monitor patients in off-site locations."


Our full report on Patient Monitoring, including market sizes and forecasts and profiles of key companies, can be found here:

Monday, July 23, 2012

EMR: With Checks Come Checks

With the reimbursement for use of EMR systems comes some paperwork responsibility that will need to be performed by hospitals, group practices and individual physicians who received EMR incentive checks in the past years.  The hospitals and providers that received checks from the government for EMR services now must document their use of EMR, according to this Fierce Healthcare story.   Garden City, N.Y.-based accounting firm of firm of Figliozzi and Company has begun auditing recipients of EMR checks one behalf of the Centers for Medicare Services (CMS). 


 The audits have been conducted after the Government Accounting Office (GAO) indicated that CMS's use of automatic checks for meaningful use requirements was not satisfactory to meet the requirements of the original law.  At this time there hasn't been reaction from major associations but it's likely these compliance costs will add at least slightly to the burden of implementing EMR. 


Kalorama's report on this topic can be found here.