Government & Policy
"It's systems that let ordinary people do extraordinary things," national coordinator for health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD said during a Health IT Policy Committee meeting talk that vice chair Paul Tang described immediately afterward as "inspiring and challenging."
American Telemedicine Association President-Elect Ed Brown, MD is the founder and CEO of Ontario Telemedicine Network in Canada. Healthcare IT News caught up with him at the recent ATA conference in Austin, Texas, to talk with him about the state of telemedicine and what he envisions it will be in the coming years.
The promise of HIEs to provide insights across the continuum of care that can dramatically alter the health of populations is emerging as among the most significant reasons for exchanging health data.
An update to the Hospital Safety Score that assigns grades "A" through "F" to more than 2,500 hospitals in the United States shows they have made only incremental progress in addressing errors, accidents, injuries and infections that kill or hurt their patients. The Leapfrog Group, a hospital watchdog group, conducts the surveys.
The ONC Policy Committee's Privacy and Security team says there's no need for limitations on providers trying to locate patient record for direct treatment, aside from patient choice. The issue does raise some policy questions, though, and the Committee asked for a reformulation of the team's suggestions.
With digitization and interconnected devices come HIPAA compliance costs and a web of security issues. Organizations should thus be devoting extra scrutiny to vendors and designing security architectures from the get-go, one cyber-security analyst suggests.
Frequently, healthcare entities focus on how the EHR will work, rather than what frontline clinicians will do with it, which creates growing user frustration, extended adoption times and increased costs. But with proper planning, an effective paper to pixel transition is possible.
Having spent more than 15 years in pure IT work, Robert Reedy looked into ONC's program to train IT pros for healthcare and found a new career, replete with continuing job offers.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) this year implemented pre-payment audits on Medicare and dually eligible -- Medicare and Medicaid -- providers participating in the EHR Incentive Programs. The audit programs target between 5 and 10 percent of eligible professionals attesting for meaningful use, according to Elizabeth Holland, director of the HIT Initiatives Group within CMS' Office of E-Health Standards and Services.
The Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have formed what they call a first-of-its-kind partnership with San Francisco-based healthcare modeling and analytics company Archimedes to provide free and easy access to CMS synthetic claims data for any software developer.