2009 MTIA Conference Update

This year’s MTIA Annual Conference was one of the best and most successful conferences in MTIA’s 20-year history. From April 22nd to 25th, people from across the globe converged on Louisville, Kentucky, for four days of informative presentations, great networking, and fun social events. Below are some key issues and strategic priorities discussed during the conference:

• The recently enacted HITECH Act (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) and healthcare reform present tremendous opportunities for the clinical documentation sector; however, the sector must be organized and focused, or else it risks squandering those opportunities.
• Attendees wholeheartedly supported a uniform visibility campaign comprised of advocacy to key health policymakers and a public relations strategy focused on the sector’s contribution to quality patient care delivery.
• The HITECH Act will deeply impact the sector, including significant new obligations with respect to HIPAA and data breach notifications.
• "Discrete reportable transcription" can be integrated with EHR technology as a method of increasing EHR adoption, since many physicians prefer the dictation process as a faster means of documenting healthcare encounters over more time consuming point and click, templated documentation approaches.
• Consumers becoming increasingly instrumental in documenting their personal health stories, combined with more outcomes driven data from the provider community, is creating dynamic new business models for the clinical documentation sector.
• The Health Story Project promotes and enhances the value of narrative text in the age of EHRs by producing and encouraging the adoption of standards for the flow of information between common types of healthcare documents and EHRs.
• The SRT Summit generated dialogue concerning the impact of SRT on the clinical documentation sector based on information provided by a sector-wide SRT survey being conducted by MTIA in partnership with AHDI and AHIMA, with the ultimate goal being the creation of a trends and best practices white paper to assist MTSOs with the challenges of purchasing, adopting, and implementing SRT.
• The QA Summit reviewed essential elements of a quality assessment process and outlined key components and metrics in order to begin producing a widely accepted quality standard protocol that will serve the healthcare community as prudent, efficient, cost-effective, valid, reliable, and scalable to ensure quality of all health records.

You still can benefit from some of the valuable information shared at the conference by purchasing a set of CDs containing audio recordings of the speakers’ presentations and, if applicable, their PowerPoint presentations. To purchase the entire collection of CDs for only $129, please visit the webpage of Lawrence Media Group, the company that produced the CDs: http://shop.lawrencemg.com/-c-21_8915.html.