Starting in 2022, providers, facilities, and health plans will be required to give consumers upfront information on costs ahead of a service and potential out-of-network costs. Whether patients have health insurance or are currently uninsured, patients will be able to get estimated costs ahead of a service to help them avoid surprise bills. In this post, we will discuss how the NextGen Pre-Services Cost Estimation in version 6.2020.1 can assist practices with these new CMS requirements.
Avoid Surprise Billing and Provide Good Faith Estimate
Topics: EPM, Community Health Center, FQHC, NextGen Optimization
OSIS NextGen Quick Tips — Improve UDS Reporting Today!
OSIS NextGen Quick Tips are here to provide insight to Community Health Centers who leverage the NextGen® Healthcare enterprise. With up to two Sound Bites each month, we'll cover topics important to you, including: EHR, EPM, EDR, Behavioral Health, PCMH, and more. These quick tips are free and offer an 'out of the box' resource to help make your NextGen Investment as highly functional as possible.
Topics: Community Health Center, NextGen Optimization, NextGen EHR, NextGen UDSX Console, UDS Reporting, OSIS NextGen Quick Tips
Uniting Health Centers to Improve Patient Outcomes
OSIS is a non-profit technology services organization dedicated to providing expert NextGen Healthcare technology assistance exclusively to Community Health Centers (CHCs) around the country. Did you know that your health center could partner with OSIS for grants, collaborative agreements, or other funding opportunities whether you are an OSIS Member or not? Through the OSIS Health Center Controlled Network (HCCN), health centers can receive additional support at no-cost as a participating health center (PHC) for federally funded OSIS projects.
Topics: EHR, Community Health Center, FQHC
Preparing Health Centers for a Culture to be Cyber Ready
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month and a time to focus our efforts on fighting cybercrime and educating one another on keeping our personal and company data safe. The theme of Cybersecurity Awareness month is Do Your Part. Be Cyber Smart and encourage people and organizations to learn new security behaviors, strengthen learned behaviors, and raise awareness about cybercrime threats. At OSIS, helping our Members protect extremely sensitive information is one of our highest priorities through set policies and procedures to ensure we are exceeding all standards set forth in the HIPAA Security Rules. In this post, we will discuss how practices can improve their cyber hygiene, resources that can help prevent a ransom attack, and discuss the preparation needed to make health centers cyber ready.
Topics: Community Health Center, Cybersecurity, Cybersecurity Awareness Month
NextGen EHR Orders Module - Tips to Streamline Patient Care
Is your practice clicking or creating a lot of steps when creating orders? How can we make it more user-friendly, streamlined, and efficient? Does your staff know how to configure and setup favorites in the NextGen Electronic Health Record (EHR) Orders Module? If you missed the recent session in the OSIS Webinar Series – Getting the Most Out of The Orders Module, this post discusses how the NextGen Orders Module can be set up more efficiently to reduce provider and staff clicks when ordering and managing tests and results.
Topics: EHR, Community Health Center, FQHC, NextGen Optimization, NextGen EHR
Healthcare Interoperability – Progress and Barriers
Healthcare providers are adapting at different paces when it comes to improving healthcare interoperability. This is a top priority for clinicians, health systems, and patients for ease of access into digital health information. Healthcare interoperability is a topic that some see as a barrier, but others have embraced technology and are progressing. To highlight the progress and the barriers of healthcare interoperability, we need to first look at what defines it.
Topics: EHR, Community Health Center, FQHC, Healthcare Interoperability
NextGen and Appropriate Use Criteria – Are You Ready?
Appropriate Use Criteria (AUC) impacts physician offices, hospital outpatient departments (including emergency departments), ambulatory surgical centers, and any other provider-led outpatient setting determined appropriate by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In this post, we will discuss some FAQs we receive at OSIS about AUC – the clinical decision support (CDS) tool that provides advanced diagnostic test recommendations based on clinical criteria from within the patient chart. We will also review how to configure AUC within NextGen® Healthcare EHR to help implement this new workflow into your health center.
Topics: EHR, Community Health Center, NextGen Optimization, CMS, AUC, Appropriate Use Criteria (AUC)
Navigating the NCQA QPASS for Successful PCMH Annual Reporting
Has your health center received Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) recognition and is working towards Annual Reporting submission? If so, you may find this blog helpful, as OSIS navigates through NCQA’s Q-PASS system for Annual Reporting (AR), which is also known as the Sustaining Phase.
Topics: PCMH, Community Health Center, FQHC
Protect Your Patients Against COVID-19 Vaccine Scammers
With the administration of millions of doses of the COVID-19 Vaccines across the world, we have inevitably seen a corresponding increase in vaccine scams. With the vaccine distribution information and guidelines changing day to day and state to state, it can be difficult to identify what is true and what is false.
In this article we will discuss seven pre- and post-vaccine scams to be aware of to help prevent scam artists from taking advantage of your patients’ personal information.
Topics: Community Health Center, FQHC, COVID-19 Vaccine
American Rescue Plan Act - Funding for Health Centers
On March 11, 2021 the White House signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, also called the COVID-19 Stimulus Package, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus in hopes to speed up the United States’ recovery from the economic and health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The package builds on the first of several measures in the CARES Act starting in March 2020 and the Consolidated Appropriations Act starting in December 2020.
Topics: Community Health Center, FQHC, American Rescue Plan Act