"Health & Medical News"

Washington — Medicare’s first run at incorporating chronic care management techniques into the program is closing at the end of this year, with most observers already describing the effort as a false start.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched the Medicare Health Support pilot project three years ago with high hopes. By hiring eight private disease management firms to set up voluntary chronic care improvement programs for beneficiaries, CMS aimed to improve health care quality while lowering costs. At one point more than 150,000 seniors were enrolled in the programs.

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Washington — Medicaid recipients in Tallahassee and surrounding Leon County are the test subjects for a bold Florida experiment: a pilot program giving them their own electronic health records.

The initiative, administered by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, runs from November to February 2008 and seeks to create EHRs for each of the 25,000 Medicaid recipients in Leon County, said Peter Finney, program manager of the Electronic Health Records Center of Excellence for Electronic Data Systems, a Plano, Texas, information technology corporation.

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Washington — Physician groups reacted with cautious optimism to a new government pilot project that will give higher Medicare payments to doctors who adopt electronic medical records.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said it wants 1,200 physician practices to participate. It will begin recruitment next summer, giving priority to small- and medium-sized practices. The agency has not determined how it will choose the practices. It also has not calculated how large the incentive payments will be. CMS will determine how much savings the program will generate and then calibrate payouts so the project ends up budget-neutral.

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