Bernie Monegain
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has tapped Northrop Grumman to develop a national repository for tracking incentive payments to healthcare providers that CMS will pay for meaningful use of electronic health records starting in 2011.
New York State's two federally designated healthcare IT regional extension centers (RECs) kicked off their work in the Big Apple Thursday amid a little hoopla and some serious talk about electronic medical records, education sessions and vendor demonstrations of how the technology works.
The Affordable Care Act offers effective new technology and sophisticated data analysis for reducing healthcare fraud that will build on programs that helped Medicare and Medicaid recover billions of dollars in 2009, according to the government's annual Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program (HCFAC) report.
It was a stroke of genius and practicality at once that created the health information technology extension program.
Editor Bernie Monegain speaks with Karen Bell, MD, the newly-appointed chair of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology.
The Psilos Group, a healthcare venture capital firm, has spotlighted information and medical technology as critical to healthcare reform, insisting that expanded adoption and investment activity in IT will produce big results.
Some hospitals are greener than others, and Practice Greenhealth, an organization that promotes sustainable healthcare practices throughout hospitals – including in the information technology arena – has identified the Premier healthcare alliance and 61 of its member hospitals as leaders.
Employer organization Dossia and Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic will integrate Mayo Clinic EmbodyHealth, a personal health management portal, with the Dossia Personal Health Platform. The integration makes the EmbodyHealth portal available to members of the Dossia network.
Sutter Health will spend $10 million over the next two years on improving patient safety, with one focus on reducing healthcare-acquired infections.
Two health IT extension centers in New York state have begun work helping primary care physicians convert from paper to digital records.