Patty Enrado

Usability is one of the major barriers for health IT adoption, particularly for electronic health records. It was no surprise then that a capacity number of attendees took on the challenge of working through various usability research methods in the workshop Usability 101: Applied Methods.

Brown & Toland Physicians took a giant step recently toward realizing the IPA's vision of providing clinical integration and connectivity for its 1,500 primary care and specialty physicians in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Eighty percent of respondents to a March 2011 Healthcare IT News survey of hospital and health system IT professionals showed that achieving meaningful use was top of mind – above privacy and security concerns.

Small and resource-poor, the Western Washington Rural Health Care Collaborative (WWRHCC), has shown it is not afraid to tackle - and complete - big projects, such as building an HIE from scratch and developing a telepharmacy system.

By early summer, four communities in Colorado will be able to securely share patient information through the Colorado Regional Health Information Organization's (CORHIO) network.

If you build or create something, wouldn't you take into account ease of use? It is unfathomable then that most EHR vendors do not systematically conduct EHR usability testing, according to Jiajie Zhang, who is overseeing a federal research project on the science of EHR usability in the SHARP program.

The 120 network hospitals and 30-plus physician groups participating in Blue Shield of California's claims transparency program continue to see shorter claims cycle times and fewer denials, resulting in significant savings.

A mid-November survey of 191 members of the College of Health Information Management Executives (CHIME) reveals that hospital CIOs are less confident they will meet Stage 1 meaningful use criteria and therefore not qualify early for EHR federal stimulus funds.

The proposed meaningful use criteria up for public comment reflected “thoughtful policy,” David Brailer, MD, told Healthcare IT News shortly after the government made the rule public on Dec. 30, 2009.

The Wisconsin Health Information Organization is working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to release CMS' Medicare data and add the information to its WHIO Health Analytics Exchange, according to executive director Julie Bartels.