Jeff Rowe

I was going to write about the Institute of Medicine holding its first meeting as the entity tapped by the ONC to study the safety of EMRs. Or is it EHRs? I read a couple of articles and EMR and EHR were interchangeable. Has the industry finally reached a point where they are interchangeable?

While healthcare entities are still trying to change the Stage 1 meaningful use criteria, the Health IT Policy Committee has begun fleshing out the Stage 2 criteria.

The 62 regional extension centers (RECs) provided feedback that enabled the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to announce the rollout of five new initiatives aimed at driving greater EHR adoption. They're great ideas, but shouldn't they have been in place when the RECs were first announced? In other words, shouldn't ONC have anticipated these needs?

Surveys aside, the stories about physicians implementing EHRs as reported in local media are incredibly instructive in understanding what's happening out in the field with EHR adoption. I read about a family practice physician in a two-physician office in Mount Pleasant, Tex. His insights are quite interesting, and I encourage you to read the article.

Many independent physicians are partnering with their local hospitals to be able to tap into the hospital's EHR system with minimal cost. What obligations the independent physician offices must fulfill depends upon the agreements made or partnerships formed. Many physician offices aren't ready to enter into such partnerships that perhaps may include exclusive physician referral rights.

The Washington & Idaho Regional Extension Center (WIREC) announced last week that it had reached a milestone of signing up its 1,000th primary care physician (PCP) to use its services to help them implement and adopt EHRs. WIREC noted that it is one of the first RECs (162 in all) to reach that milestone.

I spoke recently with Dr. Thomas Jones, chairman of the Health Record Bank's Principles Committee, who will be presenting at the Healthcare and Information Management Systems Society annual conference in February in Orlando, Fla.

Coming off of my Facebook-focused blog from yesterday, I'll turn to the recent leak of State Dept. documents on WikiLeaks.

Newt Gingrich and Dr. Kamal Thapar wrote an interesting opinion piece in AOL News on Monday, Dec. 6th, about electronic medical information.

The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics implemented an online patient portal for seven of its departments in July 2010. To date, 35 percent of the patients have accessed their medical information through the portal.