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  Fix the SGR Now! See the new flyer from the Lee County Medical Society. Please distribute to your patients along with the form letters to sign and send to our legislators to urge them to pass a permanent fix for the SGR. This information will be listed in a full page advertisement in the Fort Myers News-Press. The cost for this is being shared by Lee County Medical Society, Lee Memorial Health System, and IPALC.
Fix the SGR Flyer More about the SGR from LCMS
Newpaper Advertising IPALC has begun a marketing campaign to increase the public awareness of our organization and our physicians. We are working to establish our identity in the community. This full page advertisement appeared four times in the Fort Myers News-Press during the month of May. If you would like for your practice and physicians to be included, you must become a member. If you are a member, please review your listing and contact us if there are any errors or changes needed.
News-Press Advertisement I want to join!
EMR Presentations IPALC is sponsoring a series of demonstrations by EMR vendors during June 2010. The purpose of the series is to provide IPALC members as well as all other interested parties an opportunity to see and evaluate several of the most commonly used systems currently in use in Lee County. If there is enough interest in specific systems, we may try to work out a group purchasing arrangement. The schedule of presentations is as follows: (Click on names to go to company web site)
The presentations will be held in the Community Room on the First Floor of Gulf Coast Medical Center at 6:00 PM. Each presentation will last approximately 2 hours and will include a Q & A session. Seating is limited to 150 persons. Physicians as well as their management and IT staff are welcome to attend.
If you are interested, please RSVP online or by calling Bobi at IMA, 936-1343. 21% Cut in Medicare Physician Fees Delayed until June 1, 2010: We still need to act! Once again, last minute action by our legislators has delayed the scheduled 21% cut in Medicare physician payments mandated by the SGR, but only for a month. The AMA and LCMS are urging a permanent fix to the seriously flawed SGR formula rather than the various temporary bandaids that are being proposed. We are concerned about the dramatic impact of this drastic cut in physician fees on the access to care in Southwest Florida. Most physicians in our area are heavily dependent on Medicare revenue in order to be financially viable. The House has passed a bill to delay implementation of the cut, but the Senate has failed to act. The consequences of this cut are grave. Many physicians are threatening to stop accepting new Medicare patients. Some physicians are concerned that they will actually have to go out of business (Medicare cut threat to Southwest Florida, docs say). IPALC is urging physicians to ask their patients to support this effort by signing letters to their senators urging them to solve this problem permanently. Please download these packets and ask your patients to complete and sign. Your office staff can then fax them to our senators. The packet begins with a flyer from the AGA and a letter "from your physician." Please read the letter from Dr. Craig Sweet, President of Lee County Medical Society regarding the concerns about the SGR. Letters have been updated as of March 10, 2010. If you just want to print, you can use either format. If you would like to make any edits, use the Word format. Download packet in Word (rtf) Format Download packet in pdf format For updates and more information on this topic, please go to: http://www.leecountymedicalsociety.org/ We are collaborating with the Lee County Medical Society to help get the message out to all physicians and our patients. We need to rally all the support we can get to help solve this crucial problem. More News on this topic: Senate Fails to Block Deep Cuts in Medicare Payments (AAFP) Senate Inaction on Medicare Hurts Seniors, Military and Boomer (AMA) Board of Directors Meeting Schedule Our Board Meetings are open to all of our members. If you are interested in becoming more involved, please consider attending. Meetings are held in the second floor conference room at the IMA office on Metro Parkway at 6 PM. Our next meeting is on Monday, March 1, 2010. Membership Roster Please click on the link to the left for a list of our members. EMR and Interoperability On November 4, we attended a presentation and demo of dbMotion (www.dbmotion.com), a system currently in successful use by University of Pittsburgh. This software pulls together patient information from multiple medical record platforms. We are gathering further information to assess the feasibility of implementing such a solution in our community. We have two more demos scheduled in the near future. As some of you may know, concerns have been raised about the quality of care provided by the various hospitalists and hospitalist groups who are working in our community. Apparently, a number of patient complaints have been made directly to the hospital board. The board has thus been compelled to respond, and has requested that standards for hospitalist care be developed and implemented. Read More...
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Standards for Hospitalists and Inpatient Care 1-12-2009 ACO Workgroup--Are you interested in learning more? Accountable Care Organizations is one of the new payment models being advocated by Medicare. It appears that the days of fee for service payment for medical care are numbered. We all need to become knowledgeable about the future of how we deliver and are paid for providing medical care. In cooperation with LMHS, we are participating in the Brookings/Dartmouth ACO Learning Network. This program provides us with an opportunity to learn about this and other payment models that are changing the focus to providing more cost effective and higher quality care. We encourage you to review the resources about ACOs that are available on the IPALC web site, http://www.ipalc.org/Accountable_Care_Organizations.htm. We also encourage you to look at related models such as Medical Home and Clinical Integration. Please see the link bar on the left side of this page. If you would like to participate in the webinars and have access to additional information about this topic, please contact Dr. Penuel at 239-939-9939. Our next meeting will be held on October 1, 2009 at 6 PM. What is Clinical Integration anyway? Since the inauguration of our new president, Barack Obama, it appears that the pace of change in medicine is accelerating. Increasing attention is being focused on the unsustainable growth of medical care costs. None of us know what is going to happen, but we can all be certain that drastic changes are going to occur in healthcare. Our view is that for physicians to be successful, we must be united and meaningfully organized. An important aspect of our mission is to disseminate information regarding health care issues. We are using the web site to amass information to help physicians more clearly understand the issues and actively participate in the process of developing our future. If we do not fill this leadership void, our fate will be determined by the hospital. Improved communication between physicians and other providers is an essential component of the integration process. We are working to understand the systems that are in place in order to figure out how to achieve this level of communication. The model that appears to hold the greatest promise for our future success is Clinical Integration. We are actively researching this concept to determine how it can be implemented to better meet the needs of our patients and physicians. Please join us as we endeavor to create the future of quality medical care in our community. IPALC is an organization open to all independent physicians practicing in Lee County, Florida. For information about how to join, please contact us.
From our News Archive:
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Slide Presentation from General Meeting September 29, 2009
This blog was created by Dr. Jon Burdzy. We appreciate his comments regarding IPALC.
EMR Presentation to Lee County Medical Society EMR Survey #1 : Summary Results See our EMR page for the latest news and journal articles regarding electronic medical records
We are proud to announce that we have a total of 136 members supporting our organization with their dues and 325 physicians in 82 groups entered in our Physician Directory. Our newsletters are being sent to over 600 subscribers.
Our goal is to continue to increase the awareness of our organization and develop a physician referral system that will benefit all the independent physicians of our community.
We ask all our colleagues to get involved. If you are not receiving our newsletter, please follow the link on the left side of this page and sign up. We also invite you to join our discussion forum. We want to hear your concerns, ideas and comments.
If you would like to have your web site added to our list and your physicians entered in our directory, please contact us. There is no charge for this service.
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