Internists Put Teeth In Physician Tech Effort

The NCQA, a major managed care standards group, says there are now 124 group practices that have adopted the NCQA physician practice standards. Those group practices represent about 1,400 physicians, the NCQA estimates.

The NCQA physician practice standards call on physician practices to “use electronic systems to gather information about patients, maintain patient records, provide decision support, enter orders for prescriptions and lab tests and provide automated reminders about services or tests that patients need.”

The NCQA standards also encourage practices to “use electronic systems that interoperate with other systems using nationally accepted code sets to send, receive and integrate data such as test results from other organizations’ systems.”