ACO’s create incentives for health care providers to work together to treat an individual patient across care settings – including doctor’s offices, hospitals, and long-term care facilities.  Medicare incentives will reward ACO’s that lower growth in health care costs while meeting performance standards on quality of care and putting patients first.  Many health care providers have a significant gap in infrastructure and funding before becoming an Accountable Care Organizations.  Like any arduous process, we have to start somewhere!

This session will address the following core areas:

1. Necessary infrastructure to facilitate data capture and secure electronic patient health information
2. Patient engagement & PHR deployment
3. Data integration across the continuum of care
4. Providing ubiquitous information to leverage clinical decision support tools and engage patients
5. Transitioning administrative systems and payment models

Spend 25 minutes meeting with your conference ‘Living Group’.  Attendees will be grouped together so that starting on Day 1 you will have an opportunity to meet new contacts and maximize your conference experience.

In addition to meeting your Living Group, you will also take part in an interactive activity to determine the top challenges facing the HIT industry. The top challenges for each group will be announced at the end of the session!

With a better concept of what the Final Rule for Stage 2 MU will look like, we can understand how the new criteria will build on Stage 1 and continue the drive toward excellence in quality & patient care.  While ‘meaningful use’ of health IT has long been cliché, the importance of improving safety and reducing costs remains paramount.

This forward looking session will cover:

1. Strategies for Stage 2 compliance
2. Ensuring compliance leads to improvement
3. Potential road blocks for Stage 2
4. Lessons learned from Stage 1 and planning for Stage 3

The spread of electronic health records throughout the healthcare spectrum, standardization of health data elements, HITECH and ARRA incentives all support the sharing of patient clinical information through Health Information Exchanges. By utilizing powerful and intuitive search engines like Google, Bing and Watson, how a clinician investigates information for a specific patient will dramatically change. Secondary use of clinical information from huge databases of health data will allow patients to receive customized treatment based on their specific characteristics, diseases, medications, genetic sequences, socioeconomic backgrounds and additional factors.

Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc

This session will offer practical advice and tips on how to achieve a successful implementation of a comprehensive electronic medical record environment.  It will also show how this can provide a foundation for a future of collaborative models in a continuum-based care environment.  In addition it will also focus on the leadership actions and tactics that are critical to achieve broad acceptance throughout the organization.

Peter Fine, FACHE

Lunch on the final day will be both delicious and informative.  We’ll start off with 45 minutes for lunch service and some time to get settled.  For the last hour we’ll host a high-level, interactive work session that will satiate your thirst for knowledge once you’ve taken care of your other appetite!

This session will address the following:

1. Transitioning from data capture to data analysis
2. Capturing data that will provide better care
3. Strategies for data usage