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The CDC recently released its latest report on the adoption of electronic health records amongst office-based physicians from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.

It was reported on Jan. 26 that the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, better known as HITSP, will close shop when its contract expires Jan. 31, but John Halamka, MD, said a contract extension will keep HITSP operational until ONC awards work for the next evolution of standards development.

At BIDMC, our clinical systems are written in a hierarchical database called Cache - a very fast transactional system with great reliability and disaster recovery features.

For the most part, the American Academy of Family Physicians, an advocate for health IT, supports the meaningful use criteria that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released at the end of last year. They have an issue, however, with the reporting requirements of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

The Dept. of Health and Human Services published its Interim Final Rule, "Health Information Technology: Initial Set of Standards, Implementation Specifications and Certification Criteria for Electronic Health Record Technology," which includes certification criteria for EHRs, in the Federal Register Jan. 13. Now that the standards rules for certification have been updated to align with the meaningful use criteria, when will the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) create a process to recognize certification bodies, which is required by law?

For years a crisis has been brewing for many people who have become tangled up in a cyber-age web where healthcare records are being generated and maintained across an ever-broadening spectrum of healthcare delivery systems.

Last week's meeting of the HIT Policy Committee reportedly included extensive discussions concerning the future of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).

When Stage III of Meaningful Use is fully implemented in 2015, what will our healthcare system look like? Here's my future forward look at the changes in the provider, patient, payer, and researcher experience five years from now.

The Meaningful Use NPRM and the Initial Set of Standards and Certification Criteria IFR have now been published and are available for public comment.

There are plenty of top 10 predictions on any number of topics, but it is rare to find one focusing on healthcare IT, Chilmark Research's bailiwick.