Interoperability
A health IT consultant described the "Tower of Babel"-eqsue barrier she encounters coordinating disparate EHR systems to a panel at the Health Innovation Day conference. William Check, CTO at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association responded: "What you just described could have been the cable industries. It's amazing the parallel here."
Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author and New Yorker staffer, likened the change required for healthcare to clear the interoperability hurdle to several events of this generation, "three lessons in culture, framing and consequence," as he put it during a talk Thursday at Health Care Innovation Day in Washington.
Karen DeSalvo, MD, newly appointed national coordinator for health information technology, gave some insight Thursday on how ONC plans to proceed under her leadership. Interoperability will be top priority.
Health networks and physician practices have the most to gain from an interoperable ecosystem and, it follows, the most to lose if it doesn't go right. But one could argue that American patients and taxpayers stand to gain or lose just as much.
The ONC's Health IT Policy Committee's Privacy and Security Tiger Team is calling for public comment on privacy and policy concerns surrounding patients giving access to their health information.
Some 42 percent of U.S. hospitals have adopted telehealth platforms and are using the technology to treat patients, with several factors affecting market changes, according to new report findings.
If you're shirking your security systems' obligations all to save a few pennies, better think again. Chances are, it will end up costing much more down the road -- a whopping $1.6 billion more.
The Office of the National Coordinator had a place at the table for the 15th annual IHE North American Connectathon, filled by Doug Fridsma, MD, chief science officer and director of the ONC's Office of Science and Technology and four members of his team.
Last October and November, as HealthCare.gov struggled to accommodate visitors and offer its promised user experience, HHS staff and contractors were, among other fixes, "adding server capacity" -- suggesting that the U.S. CTO's goals of technological innovation remain to be seen in health programs.
An IT network failure at a Florida health system put the organization's $80 million Epic electronic medical record system down for the count this past week. The outage, officials reported, lasted nearly two days.