Optimizing Your Centricity Webinar Series from GE Healthcare

Optimizing Your Centricity Solution webinar series is to begin the week of December 1st.

“Your Centricity Education team is pleased to announce the upcoming launch of a new educational series, Optimizing Your Centricity Solutiongeared toward enhancing your experience with your Centricity Practice Solution and Centricity EMR products. This educational series will highlight the native functionality of your products, providing you and your organization’s users with tips to enhance your productivity and efficiency and streamline Practice Management and EMR workflows. ”

To Register for this series or  for more information click here

Free Webinar: CMS Meaningful Use Q&A

Centricity Healthcare User Group strives to provide you with the most up to date information.  There are times that vendors will have free webinars available.  Because these webinars could be useful to your practice, we wanted the information available to you.

 

Date/Time: November 19, 2014, 3:30PM – 4:30PM EST

Speaker: Justine Smith, Healthcare Consultant, Hayes Management Consulting

Regulation in healthcare is constantly evolving and so much has changed, just in the past few months. We would like to share our experience and help guide you through the ins and outs of GE Centricity and Meaningful Use, as well as provide a question and answer panel as requested at the recent CHUG conferences.

If you haven’t started Meaningful Use, it’s not too late, but there are important deadlines coming that you will want to make sure to meet. It is no longer just about incentives, as the penalties are here! Please join us for an overview of key topics as well as a question and answer session.

During our webinar you will learn:

  • Important dates that you won’t want to miss
  • Flexibility and hardship exemptions
  • What’s ahead in 2015 and beyond
  • Meaningful Use readiness, including audit preparation
  • Valuable resources that you should be using

Simply fill out this form and press “Register” to sign up for our webinar.

GE Healthcare Customer State of the Union Address

A message from GE Healthcare:

Customer State of the Union Address

Dear Centricity™ Practice Solution and Centricity EMR customers:
Jon Zimmerman, VP & GM of Clinical Business Solutions, and Peter Kinhan, VP & GM of Ambulatory Practice Solutions, invite you to attend our next Customer State of the Union webinar on Thursday, November 13, 2014.
We’ll provide an update on Centricity Practice Solution and Centricity EMR service packs and releases, discuss important information on Meaningful Use workflows and calculations, and provide an update on Clinical Quality Reporting. Our panel of experts will also be available to address your questions.

Customer State of the Union
DATE: November 13, 2014
TIME: 11:30AM-12:30PM PST | 2:30-3:30PM EST
Webinar Registration Link

Registration will be required to join the event. We will use a different system for this next meeting, so we encourage you to register and perform the recommended system tests in advance. We will record the meeting and post it to the service portal for those who cannot attend live. We hope you will join us.
Sincerely,
Peter Kinhan
Vice President & General Manager,
Ambulatory Practice Solutions
GE Healthcare IT

Donating Leftover Food to Charitable Causes

Original article posted on 11.04.14 by Ross Beatty http://www.beattygroup.com/donating-leftover-food-to-charitable-causes-2014-11-04/

One thing that seems to come up over and over again in the conference planning world is what happens to all of the leftover food? Does the hotel repurpose it for the hotel staff? Does it get thrown away? It seems like this is an area where there is a huge amount of waste.

We recently encountered this situation at the Centricity Healthcare User Group (CHUG) conference that our company help organize this fall and found ourselves wondering if there was something we could do. The first night of the event there was a catered welcome reception at the hotel. One of the events that we had set-up was a do it yourself cupcake decorating station. Well as the night progressed, the CHUG Board President, Terri Werner-Brown noticed that there were a lot of cupcakes that had not been touched nor were they going to get decorated. Instead of having the cupcakes go to waste she thought that it would be a nice gesture to see if the cupcakes could be donated. She asked us to contact the hotel and see if it was possible to have the cupcakes donated, which in return we were told was not possible because it was against hotel policy since it was a liability.

The thing is, it is not actually illegal to donate the leftover food, it is just against hotel policy due to their fear of liability for the donation. Many people do not know this but the Bill Emerson Food Donation Act was created to allow people to make donations to the hungry without having to worry about being liable for any harm that may come from the donation.

What does the law do?

The law protects good-faith donors from civil and criminal liability in the event that the product later causes harm to its recipients. The Emerson Act gives uniform protection to food donors who may cross state lines.

Who is protected?

The law protects food donors, including individuals and nonprofit feeding programs that act in good faith. More specifically, the law protects individuals, corporations, partnerships, organizations, associations, government entities, wholesalers, retailers, restaurateurs, caterers, farmers, gleaners, nonprofit agencies, and others.

What sort of food is protected?

The Emerson Act provides protection for food and grocery products that meet all quality and labeling standards imposed by federal, state, and local laws and regulations, even though the food may not be readily marketable due to appearance, age, freshness, grade, size, surplus, or other conditions.

Where can I find a place to donate?

Find a local food bank using the Food Bank Locator on Feeding America’s Web site. You just need to connect the local food bank and the catering firm, they will take care of all the details.

With the state of the current economy, food banks are having difficulty keeping their shelves full in order to help serve the hungry. As event planners we want to know how we can help out, especially when we have food that we could donate.

Next time you want to donate the leftover food from your event the best thing to do is contact event caterer early in the planning process and let them know this is something you want to do. Use the resources that are readily available and last but not least, do not take no for an answer!

 

Upcoming Southeast Centricity User Conference

The annual Southeast Centricity User Conference, sponsored by HealthSystems is coming soon for Centricity Practice Solution users.

“Designed for novice and experienced clinicians, administrators, and front and back office staff, this education-packed event features two days of concurrent learning tracks for participants. Many key GE representatives attend and speak at the conference, and many GE vendor partners speak and exhibit throughout the event.”

The 2015 event will be held March 25-27 at Chateau Elan in Braselton, Georgia.

“Last year we hosted 230+ attendees, exhibitors, industry expert guest speakers and a team of GE executives. In 2015 we look forward to an even bigger and better SEUC.”

For more information regarding the event: Conference Information

Increase Productivity with Letters

Insurance Companies have never made claims processing a simple task and with ICD10 this is likely to get worse and not better. Now is the perfect time to reevaluate your accounts receivable department, analyze their workflow, and increase productivity.

Utilizing letters within CPS is one way to make the most of staff’s precious time. How often does your staff need to complete appeal letters in order to be paid for services? This is a frequent task at our site and one that previously took so long it was pushing aside other necessary tasks. Staff workflow included pulling the carriers appeal form off their website and manually completing it, too much time was going into ‘double data entry’ all the information is listed in CPS, yet staff were spending time copying it onto the insurance companies form.

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