Mary Mosquera
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will acquire cutting edge analytic technology to predict and prevent potentially fraudulent payments in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
A panel that advises the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has endorsed steps to help healthcare providers identify and address hospitals, clinics, labs and other organizations electronically through directories.
Early results from an annual survey of provider practices show that more than half of the physicians who responded use at least partial EHRs in their offices, slightly higher than the 2009 figure of 48.3 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is establishing several "communities of practice" to help its Beacon program establish clinical decision support technologies, care transitions programs, and pharmacy solutions and tools in healthcare improvement projects.
The White House has called for a "universal exchange language" to enable healthcare providers to share health information in real time, in order to modernize and coordinate diagnosis and treatment while incorporating privacy and security of personal data.
A Department of Health and Human Services advisory panel wants feedback from the public about concepts it has developed for clinical quality measures for meaningful use in 2013 and 2015.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is providing grants to states in order to fund health information exchange breakthroughs in five challenging areas that will promote sharing of patient records nationwide.
With the initial model for the Direct Project, a streamlined version of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) in place, the federal Health IT Standards Committee has been evaluating how well it stacks up technically against other point-to-point data exchange methods.
The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) has unveiled the first version of the software that will allow simple information exchange between providers, a crucial enabler for the first stage of meaningful use of electronic health records.
A crucial vote relating to operational rules for the nationwide health information network (NHIN), required for a proposed rule on NHIN governance due to be published early next year, has been delayed.