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Calculating market share for the electronic health record (EHR) market is no easy task. There are over 300 software vendors, many market segments (consider: size of practice served, specialties services, inpatient/outpatient) and very "fuzzy" sources of data.

As many of the front-of-the-pack payers steer from ICD-10 assessment into remediation, they are finding the transition to be more challenging and even more resource-intensive than they thought. And that realization is forcing payers to take a more pragmatic – and less strategic – approach to the conversion.

A number of hospitals in Northwestern Indiana are deploying EHRs or integrating disparate EHR systems across their facilities to qualify for the federal stimulus funds. They're not implementing purely for the money. Do the math.

CMS announced it will spend $34 million to have Northrop Grumman track health IT incentive payments. It seems as if the last several months millions of dollars have been pouring out of HHS. For those who are opposed to all this spending, this announcement may seem like the federal government is pouring more money into a bottomless pit.

BIDMC implemented Computerized Provider Order Entry in 2001. As we approach the ten year anniversary of our implementation, it's great to see the recent press on the Stanford study demonstrating a 20% decrease in mortality after implementing CPOE at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

The Dept. of Health and Human Services is going to be conducting two surveys on patient perceptions of EHRs. Getting patient buy-in is just as critical as having physicians adopt health IT. It's one thing to get physicians to use the system. It's another thing if patients don't want their physicians to have electronic records on them.

Attendees at The Institute for Health Technology Transformation's Spring Summit last week got a lot of valuable lessons learned and best practices to take back to their healthcare organizations. Those who weren't there can still run with the takeaways.

For healthcare policymakers, the perfect world would probably include a healthcare sector in which providers of all sizes worked together to make the transition to new HIT as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Another misguided, uninformed EHR vendor will discount the price of EHR software for doctors willing to sell patient data! According to CEO Jonathan Bush, "Athena might be able to halve the amount that physicians pay to use its EHR."

When you begin reading a commentary about the value of health IT and the federal stimulus incentives for the healthcare industry by the CEO of a health IT company, the guard goes up. Watch out for the bias in the cheerleading.