Mary Mosquera

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is readying a set of electronic accounting and processing tools that will help authenticate, track and manage payments to healthcare providers participating in the federal meaningful use financial incentive program.

Healthcare providers who already use electronic health records urged a federal health IT advisory panel last week to add more goals for improving patient care coordination into the meaningful use financial incentive plan.

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) is preparing to launch a formal rulemaking to establish rules of the road for the nationwide health information network, a process policymakers hope will clear the way for large and small organizations to use the NHIN.

Providers using an opt-out approach to consent should make sure patients grasp the privacy implications, say policy team members.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will begin to make meaningful use incentive payments to eligible physicians and hospitals as early as May 2011, according to a senior CMS official, who detailed steps the agency is taking to start up the incentive program.

Rite Aid Corp. has agreed to pay $1 million to settle potential violations of federal privacy rules when the national pharmacy chain failed to protect sensitive customer information in disposing of prescriptions and pill bottles in store trash containers.

Finding a durable business model to keep afloat financially is one of the biggest challenges facing health information exchanges as the federal and state grants that funded their start up and early development expire.

A Health and Human Services Department advisory panel has taken the first steps to enabling people who are enrolled in federal and state health and social services programs to easily find out if they are eligible for benefits from other programs.

The Department of Health and Human Services plans to develop a national inventory of research on the treatments and medical interventions that are most effective for patients.

A new system at the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) will track the progress state health departments are making in chronic disease prevention and control by integrating the reports currently produced by separate systems.