Maricopa County officials will spend $10 million to implement an EMR system, which will help document and manage medical data for its thousands of jail inmates. The county has tied EMR capabilities to efficiency and better clinical outcomes. This is a good story to inspire other jail and prison systems, and healthcare providers that are still on the fence about EMRs.

CMS announced it will spend $34 million to have Northrop Grumman track health IT incentive payments. It seems as if the last several months millions of dollars have been pouring out of HHS. For those who are opposed to all this spending, this announcement may seem like the federal government is pouring more money into a bottomless pit.

Another misguided, uninformed EHR vendor will discount the price of EHR software for doctors willing to sell patient data! According to CEO Jonathan Bush, "Athena might be able to halve the amount that physicians pay to use its EHR."

Amid an economy still recovering from a deep recession, students participating in the University of California San Diego Extension Health Information Technology Program are very lucky.

When you read articles about physicians who aren't going to make the switch to electronic health records, it's always interesting to note the age of the nay-sayers. I'm not trying to start a war between generations, but age has a lot to do with refusal to adopt health IT.