Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Installation will require a vendor's assistance.

For once, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services stuck to a deadline--and proved all the naysayers wrong.

In the face of rumors that CMS would delay the release of the mostly free electronic health record software Vista-Office to physician offices, CMS announced that the software was ready. Providers can't obtain the software directly from CMS right now, however--they have to obtain it from a "qualified vendor," who'll need to be paid for helping to install it.

The software comes with other costs as well, CMS cautions in a Sept. 19 release. For one thing, providers have to pay to license the American Medical Association's database of CPT code descriptors and the database that comes with the software. Physicians that want the software on computer disk will have to pay for that, too.

Vista-Office is an adaptation of software that the Veterans Health Administration uses. CMS is testing the software to see how well it works in physicians' offices, and how well it plays with other software physicians may already have. The new version of Vista-Office supports order entry, documentation templates and clinical reminders, as well as patient registration, quality measure reporting and prescription printing and faxing.

Find it online: Find out more about Vista-Office by visiting www.vista-office.org or www.worldvista.org.