Interoperability
Darrel Whitmill, RN, manager of physician informatics and meaningful use at Cumberland Medical Center in Crossville, Tenn., wanted to beat the rush to Stage 2 meaningful use attestation, and he did.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has awarded a three-year, $162 million contract for upgrades to its VistA electronic health record. The announcement comes just as government officials assert in a news release Thursday that the multi-billion dollar acquisition to modernize the Department of Defense electronic health record is on track.
Anne Arundel Medical Center has been expanding in recent years, and as part of the challenge of optimizing 49 ambulatory practices as part of its network, the health system has had to integrate IT systems -- including the Epic EHRs used at hospitals and the cloud-based athenahealth technology at many of the practices.
Another group of health IT powerhouses is joining forces to compete with Epic and IBM for the Department of Defense's lucrative $11 billion system modernization contract.
The folks at cloud-based EHR company athenahealth found cause to celebrate earlier this week when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid posted the list of EHR products providers used to attest to meaningful use.
With its sights set on a Department of Defense deal, technology giant IBM announced Tuesday it was teaming up with EHR behemoth Epic Systems to compete for the DoD Healthcare Management Systems Modernization contract. The DHMSM is slated to replace the current Military Health System and will serve some 9.7 million beneficiaries.
Interoperability, the Achilles heel of electronic health record progress has been in the limelight since the beginning of the stimulus package incentive funding for EHR adoption. Against that backdrop, ONC on Thursday offered a 10-year plan for achieving interoperability.
Apple on Monday touted its working with the Mayo Clinic as it rolled out an app that would piece together healthcare information from many third-party apps -- including one from Mayo -- to give consumers a comprehensive medical view on a mobile device.
More than 30 billion dollars have been spent. And while it is reasonable that many HIT outcomes are still unfulfilled, the path forward seems murky. EHR adoption has surged, but much of what has been broken about health IT in the United States still remains, writes John Loonsk, MD. That's why he's urging a hard reboot.
Epic to non-Epic clinical data sharing can be done, but it is not without challenges, according to a new report from research firm KLAS. The report examines what health organizations not using an Epic system have to do in order to share data with health systems that employ an Epic EHR.