PRESS RELEASES
BLOGS
RESOURCES
NEWS
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.
May 9, 2013
News
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.
May 3, 2013
News
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.
May 2, 2013
News
The Department of Health and Human Services has released an enhanced National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care -- a blueprint meant to help organizations improve healthcare quality in serving diverse communities in the U.S.
May 1, 2013
News
Can the current regulatory structure in place within the federal government keep pace with health IT without inhibiting innovation? A difficult question to answer, indeed, particularly in light of what National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD, calls a "seismic shift" under way in three aspects of healthcare: how it's paid for, how it's delivered and how patients engage in their own care.
May 1, 2013
News
Only 2 percent of state and local governments have a complete big data strategy. That's despite one in three surveyed agencies indicating that their data set has grown too big to analyze with the current processes and technologies in place, according to a report published Monday by MeriTalk.
April 30, 2013
News
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to track the health of a population: the average blood pressure of a large group of people, the rate of mental illness, the average weight. Epidemiologists have been collecting this kind of data for years, but now, in Oregon, there is cold, hard cash riding on these metrics.
April 29, 2013
News
The mobile health application market is headed for a serious growth spurt, according to a new report by Research and Markets projecting the industry will swell 61 percent by 2017, reaching heights of $26 billion.
April 28, 2013
News
The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.
April 28, 2013
News
Marilyn Tavenner, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, received accolades from both sides of the aisle at a hearing on April 9 to consider her nomination to head CMS. Senate Finance Committee leaders indicated a decision would come soon.
April 28, 2013
News
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reports it has paid out nearly $12.7 billion in meaningful use incentive payments through February 2013, according to the latest figures available.
April 28, 2013
News
The Department of Health and Human Services unveiled its $967 billion for the 2014 fiscal year on April 10.
It includes funding increases for programs in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, early childhood education, mental health and substance abuse treatment and Affordable Care Act implementation, with certain portions of the budget subject to Congressional approval, such as a $1.5 billion request for federally-facilitated insurance exchanges.
April 28, 2013
News
I spent a couple days this week at the annual meeting of the Medical Group Management Association, in San Antonio. I had the opportunity to speak about healthcare social media to an engaged crowd, and to attend a number of other interesting sessions.
October 25, 2012
Blog
Apparently not. I missed something pretty important in my review of the Standards rules with respect to quality reporting. All I can say was that it was late...
August 30, 2012
Blog
The August HIT Standards Committee focused on criteria to assess standards maturity, concerns about the timing of the Meaningful Use 2014 edition final rule, further work on the national curated vocabulary and code set repository, and an important discussion about future ONC S&I framework efforts.
August 16, 2012
Blog
There is little question that healthcare is undergoing a significant transformation. Patient-centered, accountable care and pay-for-performance reimbursements are converging to create a unique environment for payers, providers and patients alike.
July 18, 2012
Blog
Never before has the industry of healthcare information technology seen such rapid growth both in scope and volume of work.
July 17, 2012
Blog
Bloomberg News reported this week Mitt Romney might be on the verge of making a huge mistake when it comes to healthcare. He's supposedly days away from rolling out an alternative healthcare plan to President Obama's, one that involves a change in the tax code's treatment of healthcare.
May 25, 2012
Blog
Today, we announced two exciting changes within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT – the creation of an Office of the Chief Medical Officer and an Office of Consumer eHealth.
May 16, 2012
Blog
A decay in access to medical services for American adults could continue even if President Obama is re-elected in November, according to a recent Health Affairs study.
May 9, 2012
Blog
Todd Park (@todd_park), United States chief technology officer for the Obama Administration, engaged in a live Twitter chat as part of Big Data Week, a string of community-led events relating to big data. Here is a Twitter recap of the Q&A.
April 25, 2012
Blog
The candidates are still going at it. For frontrunner Mitt Romney, the biggest challenge of the Republican presidential primaries seems to be the direct similarities between his own Massachusetts healthcare law, and the Affordable Care Act, spearheaded by President Obama.
April 4, 2012
Blog
We asked our social media followers whether they feel a tax on the people would be the best possible penalty. Is it unconstitutional? Is it fair? Are there other sanctions that seem more realistic? Here's a Twitter recap of their responses.
March 27, 2012
Blog
Like many of you, I made the annual pilgrimage to the HIMSS Conference last month but I didn’t write much publicly about it. Here’s what I learned while I was in Vegas and my takeaways for the rest of the year.
March 27, 2012
Blog
Stories on healthcare IT policy focus on subjects such as legislative developments impacting healthcare IT, regulations for the use of IT in the delivery of healthcare, guidelines for monitoring quality of care, and funding opportunities in healthcare IT. Policy stories often deal with the federal, state and local institutions responsible for regulating the healthcare IT industry.
