News
The overarching message delivered to joint HIT Policy and Standards Committees by the JASON task force on Oct. 15: The government should "act with urgency" to encourage and motivate the healthcare industry, using whatever mechanisms available, to fuel interoperability through meaningful use.
ONC's work to drive interoperability is under perhaps more intense scrutiny than ever. Yet, a sense emerged on Wednesday morning during a meeting of the joint HIT Policy and Standards Committees that, while much work remains, the notion that there is no interoperability in America is wrong.
Cash flow into the healthcare IT sector may just have reached its limit. Coming down from a torrid second quarter, Q3 venture capital funding for the sector dropped nearly 50 percent, according to the findings of a new report.
A coalition of healthcare associations today called on HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell to revamp the meaningful use program. "Without changes to the MU program and a new emphasis for interoperable EHRs/EMRs systems and HIT infrastructure, we believe that the opportunity to leverage these technologies will not be realized," the organizations wrote.
Here's the good news: Seventy-seven percent of free-standing physician practices have an ambulatory electronic medical record system installed, and a robust 90 percent of hospital-owned providers are up and running with EMRs. But there's not-so-good news, too.
National coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, revealed on Tuesday that ONC now has a new Chief Privacy Officer. "She brings a set of rich experiences at the intersection of health information, privacy, and modernizing the health care delivery system," DeSalvo wrote in an email to staff.
An academic medical center in California is notifying patients of a HIPAA breach after officials discovered that a physician's email account had been hacked by an outside source.
Tech giant Google is trying out the telehealth waters, after reports last week confirmed the company was in the trial phase of a video-based platform that connects consumers searching online for health data with physicians.
Providers have begun to make targeted use of leading-edge technologies to optimize their electronic medical records, but the vast majority don't yet have the IT capacity to make full use of advancements such as big data and the cloud.
Stage 2 of meaningful use is supposed to be about interoperability of data, with electronic records flowing securely between sites as needed to help hospitals and doctors provide better care. But the number of attestations to Stage 2 has been anemic, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting true interoperability is a long way off.