Health Access San Antonio, the groundbreaking local non profit which has digitized medical records from doctors offices, clinics, and hospitals across the region and as far away as Dallas and Corpus Christi, says it will be able to use those records to provide documentation for physicians to more easily receive reimbursement from Medicaid and Medicare, News Radio 1200 WAOI reports
.HASA CEO Gijs van Oort tells News Radio 1200 WOAI the organization has received clearance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as a 'qualified registry.'
"We looked at our information, we looked at our data capacity, and we realized that we have a wonderful opportuinty to help these physicians," he said. "Not only to help pull their data together for them, but to submit this data to the feds, so the doctors don't have to spend a lot of time and a lor of office work to accomplish that."
This has the potential to save physicians, especially individual family practice doctors, time and money by relieving them of the responsibility of filling out tons of paperwork. Many physicians say they now spend as much as one third of their time, time they could be spending seeing patients and providing medical care, filling out the government forms needed to receive payment for Medicare and Medicaid patient treatment.
Van Oort says HASA can even do a more complete job than the physicians can, due to the nature of electronic health records.
HASA's goal, under federal law, is to make sure all patient's medical records are available on line. To get rid of the rolling stacks of paper files and clipboards which used to be a routine part of a doctor's practice, and replace them with complete digitized records of every patient's treatment, outcomes, and allergies.
The goal is to end expensive duplicate testing, and eliminate the need for those bracelets many people have worn over the last several decades to tell physicians about potential adverse reactions, allergies, or chronic conditions if they were to be rolled into an emergency room while unconscious.
Now, thanks to HASA, all of those records are instantly available to any physician at any time, speeding care, preventing duplication, and allowing doctors to streamline diagnosis.
And Van Oort says that same robust system will also allow physicians to receive proper and fair reimbursement from federal health programs.
"For instance, if the patient has had some event at another location, like if they had a blood test at the hospital, the physician will still get credit for that event," he said.
Van Oort says medical care, whether it is under private insurance, Obamacare, or some Republican program, will become more data driven, and having access to that data by all medical personnel will make for a more efficient system and cut down on costs.