In March, the big question weighing on the minds of policymakers was a crucial one: Wait, or move ahead on Stage 2 of meaningful use?

Just three days past the Jan. 6 opening day for providers to register for meaningful use incentives, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that some 4,000 healthcare providers had signed up.

The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has launched its HIM Jobs for America initiative, and announced a public-private partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services. The announcement came last month at the association’s 83rd annual convention in Salt Lake City.

Google Health’s recent announcement that it will discontinue its personal health record vault service has analysts from around the industry questioning whether PHRs are a workable information source in their current form.

The Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday awarded $40 million in grants to public health departments across the country to help them strengthen their performance, efficiency and infrastructure, including health IT systems. The grants are also aimed at creating jobs.

With PACS and other diagnostic imaging files quickly diminishing healthcare data storage capacities, providers are scrambling to find a much larger repository to handle their needs. More and more, that means gravitating toward the cloud, IT vendors say.

From unproven mobile platforms to legacy EHRs, some healthcare IT should just be avoided. Shahid Shah follows his list of <a href="http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/5-technologies-every-hospital-should-be-using">"5 technologies every hospital should be using"</a> with five IT practices to avoid at all costs.

With the wide array of health IT products on the market, determining what's essential technology can be difficult. Shahid Shah, enterprise software analyst and creator of the blog The Healthcare IT Guy, suggests the five technologies every hospital should be using.

They say the early bird gets the worm. In this case, 69,099 worms (or ICD-10 diagnostic codes) warrant an ahead-of-the-game approach to transition. Melanie Endicott gives us five tips for ICD-10 success.

It's noble and potentially cost-efficient, but embracing the "go green" trend isn't simple. Jerry Buchanan of eMids Technologies shares five powerful green IT practices for healthcare.

New healthcare IT jobs are part of the Jobs Initiatives for Rural America, which was announced by President Obama on Aug. 16 at the White House Rural Economic Forum. The plan includes making Department Health and Human Services (HHS) loans available to help more than 1,300 critical access hospitals recruit additional staff, and helping rural hospitals purchase software and hardware to implement health IT.

While stubbornly high unemployment continues to drag on the rest of the economy, the healthcare industry can’t seem to find enough qualified people to fill its information technology needs. Unlike other sectors where hiring remains muted, health systems are crying out for talent in IT, information management and coding, employment specialists say.

CPOE has momentum in the Meaningful Use era, but implementation remains slow and difficult. Learn the Leapfrog Group's six secrets to CPOE success.

The emphasis placed on health IT team performance has increased as the industry undergoes landmark changes. Here are nine ways to support your health IT team and ensure not only their success, but also the success of your entire organization.

Usability: the concept is often at the root of slow adoption of EMR systems, and rightfully so. Although effective training and implementation methods affect user adoption rates as well, poor usability has a strong impact on productivity, error rate and user satisfaction.

Children's Clinics for Rehabilitative Services in Southern Arizona is using fingerprint biometrics to increase access to – and the security of – its new electronic health record system.

In an evolution one exec says will help physicians face an "onslaught of uncertainties and challenges," GE Healthcare has launched the latest version of its integrated EMR and practice management system for physician practices, Centricity Practice Solution 10.

The debate over how multi-campus hospitals will be eligible for meaningful use incentives continues on Capitol Hill. Last month, a bipartisan group of more than 50 House members submitted a bill that would change how Medicare and Medicaid incentives are paid to those hospitals.

Farzad Moshashari, the national Coordinator for Health Information Technology, is suppo5ting the Health IT Policy Committee’s recommendation for a delay of Stage 2 start date from 2013 to 2014.

The government has found a new high-tech way to crack down on fraud in the Medicare program – predictive modeling. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said it would launch the initiative on July 1.