Mary Mosquera
The U.S. Army awarded healthcare software provider InterSystems Corp. a grant to deploy its technology to set up health information exchange services among military and commercial healthcare providers across the Puget Sound, Wash., region.
The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense have launched their fourth virtual lifetime electronic record (VLER) data sharing pilot in Spokane, Wash., the latest in a program aimed at testing the exchange of patient information over the nationwide health information network (NHIN).
A new federal health IT advisory panel is at work on setting up a means of governing the nationwide health information network (NHIN) in a way that will earn the trust of healthcare providers and consumers and expand its use by the healthcare community.
Even as the Office of the National Coordinator named Cincinnati and Detroit as its final two of 17 Beacon Communities on Sept. 2, it was already at work on measures designed to share what IT approaches work best for the Beacons with clinics and medical practices across the country.
The Health IT Policy Committee has created a task force to pursue the use of directories across state HIEs to support provider and patient look-up as well as to enhance public health reporting.
The Department of Health and Human Services has made available an online tool from its Healthcare.gov Web site that streamlines the public's search for insurance coverage options.
The federal Health IT Policy Committee is backing a plan to build a federal database of business rules that states could use to help determine the eligibility for Medicaid and other federal health insurance programs.
The federal Health IT Policy Committee has endorsed a set of recommendations on when healthcare providers must obtain consent before exchanging patient heath records electronically with other clinicians, testing labs or health information exchange (HIE) networks.
Health information exchanges cannot share sensitive patient information beyond a simple point-to-point exchange without first obtaining a patient's consent, concluded the federal privacy and security tiger team.
Employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs continued to lose mobile devices in July, but the number of overall security breaches the department experienced declined slightly from the previous month, according to VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker.