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With the looming deadlines resulting from the HITECH Act, physicians are scrambling to choose and implement technology that will meet meaningful use guidelines certified by the Dept. of Health and Human Services.

For those healthcare organizations that don't yet have a picture of the advantages ICD-10 will bring, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has outlined some of the most important ones.

Ohio wants its commercial payers to incentivize physicians to adopt EHRs in the same way that CMS is incentivizing physicians through the federal stimulus programs. It makes sense.

In an opinion piece in the Baltimore Sun last week, Ritu Agarwal related her personal experiences about the problems with paper-based patient records and in a very convincing way made a case for EHR adoption.

Institute of Medicine President Harvey Fineberg and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius launched the Community Health Data Initiative on June 2 at an IOM Forum in Washington, D.C. The initiative represents the hard work of many people, especially HHS CTO Todd Park.

There were many concerns when ARRA funds were first announced, with fears of the digital divide widening being one of the major ones. Thus far, HHS and ONC have done a great job in terms of thoughtful and thorough strategic planning and establishing programs to ensure that those concerns are addressed.

Amidst all the millions of federal dollars slated for health IT adoption, HHS understands the importance of protecting patient information in electronic form.

With the HITECH provisions of the ARRA, federal policymakers have resorted to a classic "carrots and sticks" approach to moving the healthcare sector toward greater use of HIT.

How do you get physicians to use EHRs? As many early adopters and current implementers are finding, just making them available in the physician office, hospital or clinic is not going to cut it.

It is striking how much people around the world have in common when it comes to healthcare delivery. They share, for example, a perception that their governments should be doing more to make healthcare accessible to the most vulnerable and that their governments do not engage them enough when it comes to setting priorities for healthcare spending.