Mike Miliard

Premier healthcare alliance has partnered with Carmel, Ind.-based Clinical Architecture in an effort to normalize disparate healthcare data and help care providers better understand and use health information.

The National Priorities Partnership (NPP) published five case studies on Jan. 25 that sought to explore “on-the-ground” application and alignment with national priorities for improving healthcare.

With Minnesota's GOP caucus set for Feb. 7, we spoke to the North Star State's health IT honcho about public-private partnerships, electronic health records, health information exchange, telehealth and more. Often billed as the healthiest state in the U.S., Minnesota has long been a healthcare IT leader.

The Premier healthcare alliance has joined with Verisk Health, which develops risk assessment and decision analytics technology, to offer data to hospitals and health systems meant to help better measure the health of their communities and develop new care models.

Often considered the healthiest state, Minnesota began harnessing HIT to bridge private and public health years before the HITECH Act. It's building on that EHR foundation for health information exchange, and is also currently cultivating a new crop of HIT professionals: informaticians.

To describe the still-nascent collection of health information exchanges in the United States as a "patchwork" is rather an understatement: Sometimes it's more of a crazy quilt. There are public and private exchanges, large and small, and state, regional and local HIEs – all in various stages of completion.

Earlier this year a series of articles in Slate by Farhad Manjoo raised some eyebrows – and perhaps quickened some heartbeats. It was titled "Will robots steal your job?" Frighteningly, for some medical professionals the answer was in the affirmative.

In late 2011, Siemens became the latest in a long procession of healthcare behemoths to scoop up a health information exchange vendor, with its acquisition of Yardley, Pa.-based MobileMD.

Dossia, the open-source personal health record service developed by a group of Fortune 500 employers, recently announced that the Dossia Health Management System has been deployed at six of its founding member companies – leading to sharp uptick in patient engagement.

Now is time of year when people dust off their crystal balls, polish up their powers of prognostication and make predictions for the annum ahead. What will 2012 hold in store?