If you’re a small healthcare provider with simple exchange needs who wants to qualify for Stage 1 Meaningful Use incentives, you may benefit from NHIN Direct, a project recently announced by the Office of the National Coordinator. The project is on a fast track for implementation; by May, potential users will see a set of
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HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced awards in the amount of $162 billion last week to help 16 states facilitate health information exchange and advance health information technology. The awards are part of the $2 billion effort to achieve widespread meaningful use of health IT and are the second and final awards under the cooperative agreement.
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Could solving healthcare’s interoperability challenge be as simple as installing a plug-and-play device in a physician’s office? The answer is “yes,” says Marc Willard, CEO of Certify Data Systems, whose San Jose, CA-based company has developed a solution that enables the secure electronic flow of clinical data between hospitals and physician practices, regardless of the
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Cost can be a major stumbling block when it comes to the long-term survival of Health Information Exchanges. By partnering in the development of an open source solution, however, healthcare leaders in Connecticut are keeping their costs affordable – and are upbeat about the sustainability of their HIE. “One of the issues we ran into
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Since the release of the latest Meaningful Use guidelines and EHR certification requirements on December 30, health system CIOs have been busy disseminating the details and interpreting the effect on their organizations. For hospitals hoping to qualify for economic stimulus funds, two of the biggest challenges will be addressing the extensive reporting requirements and adopting
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If you’ve been following the discussions about Meaningful Use, standards, and certification over the past year, then the plans for improving healthcare quality through the use of health IT released by the ONC and CMS on December 30, 2009 shouldn’t hold any surprises. Detailed in a total of nearly 700 pages, the two documents define
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The newly formed HIT Policy Committee’s NHIN Workgroup held its first hearing earlier this month, focusing on the role of directories and, “looking at what we can do today to increase information exchange,” according to co-chair Danny Weitzner, associate administrator for the Office of Policy Analysis and Development in the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and
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With the proposed rule for Meaningful Use due out shortly, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s HIT Policy Committee is looking beyond 2010. “We will be thinking about the road ahead after Meaningful Use,” said ONC’s National Coordinator for HIT David Blumenthal, MD, MPP at the committee’s December 15 meeting. The committee
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Theoretically at least, when hospitals share patient data electronically, it can be a positive step in improving care and safety. In reality, hospitals’ concerns about competing for market share, data ownership, and costs of setting up an exchange platform can make the process difficult to work through. As the members of recently launched Carolina eHealth
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The question of how specialists and other providers can be eligible for Meaningful Use incentive payments has been simmering on the HIT Policy Committee’s back burner for months and was finally addressed at the committee’s October 27-28 meeting, raising questions about whether EHR adoption will provide a reasonable return on investment for these providers. Community
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