Earlier this year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Medicare FFS Program announced that they would hold two National Version 5010 Testing Days – one on June 15 and one on August 24. The program was billed as one that would give trading partners the opportunity to come together and test compliance with the help of a real-times support desk and direct and immediate access to MACs.

Although it is being promoted as a time for technology vendors to officially test with Medicare and Medicaid, many of these organizations have been testing their ability to successfully transmit 5010 data for months to ensure they are prepared. So what is the point of “National Version 5010 Testing Day?” Mostly it is to promote awareness of the pending transition and to reiterate the fact that medical practices must take a few steps to prepare for the transition or risk the integrity of their revenue cycle.
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With social networks popping like weeds right now, healthcare firms need to make sure that they have a solid strategy for determining which network to join and when. Each week new social outlets emerge for different lifestyles, hobbies and careers – including ones for the healthcare industry.

So with new niche social networks starting every day, should you try to incorporate every single one into your social media strategy? If not, how do you go about determining which ones are worthy to pursue?

Although you are not always going to know which network is the next Twitter, there are a few tips that can help you pick the right network for your goals and objectives:

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Last month Twitter unveiled its latest feature – lists. This new feature provides a way to organize the people you are following and a way to find new accounts on Twitter – including people that may be experts in a certain subject or interested in the same hobby as you. The idea for lists on Twitter came from Twitter’s own research about what features were popular of external tweeting clients such as TweetDeck, and lists became one that Twitter could build to help make the micro-blogging agent more user-friendly.

Although this is Twitter’s equivalent of a Facebook “Group,” it will certainly impact the way healthcare marketers use Twitter. With this additional option for Tweeters, marketers and communicators can create lists for upcoming trade shows, groups of media experts or lists of successful healthcare-focused Tweeters. Along with the ability to group the people you follow on Twitter together in a list, all lists can be made public so that you can show others who to follow. In addition, Twitter clients such as Sesmic Desktop have already adopted the Twitter lists feature into its own software to help users keep up with the latest options from Twitter and not just to features that an external platform can offer. (more…)

Twitter is rapidly becoming an everyday tool for all businesses, including healthcare IT companies. As this social network becomes more entrenched in the marketing and PR world, people need to understand ways to successfully use Twitter to promote their company or brand. After finding ways to attract fellow Tweeters to follow an account, people running the page need to know how keep people from unfollowing that same micro-blog. Below are some reasons why people stop following other Tweeters and ways to avoid this from happening:

1. You share too much information: Although the main question Twitter poses is “what you are doing,” most people do not care if you are brushing your teeth or sitting on the porch. Twitter is meant to start a conversation, and the only way that you can do that is by providing valuable information to your followers.
2. You are constantly updating your status: Similar to reason number one, constantly updating your status on Twitter will annoy followers and they will not be able to see what the other Twitter accounts have to say. Unless you are in the middle of a major crisis or an interesting event, avoid repeated back-to-back tweets. (more…)

Earlier this year, Google announced its latest product, Google Wave, and positioned it as a revolutionary way to communicate and collaborate on projects. Although not much was known about Google Wave in the first few months after the announcement, executives did share that Google Wave would give users the following features:

• The ability to share documents in multiple formats. Much like Gmail’s share feature, text documents, videos, maps and other files can easily be transferred without the worrying about file size;
• Real-time collaboration allowing users in different locations to edit documents simultaneously and discuss the edits;
• Replay options that allow new members to replay conversations and see how the project evolved over time;
• Natural-language capabilities which provide word suggestions and spell check; and
• Options to extend Google Wave invitations to others and to embed one wave in another.

With these features and the brand power of Google, hundreds of thousands of people signed up to beta test Google Wave and in late September the first 100,000 people were invited to join the Wave. From that invitation, Mashable published a short video about the features they had been able to test and how they predicted it being used. (more…)