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Geisinger Chief Data Officer Nicholas Marko, MD, says deriving value from data depends on a sound roadmap. Here’s a look at how to determine what you need to get there.

Providence Health and Services also joins consortium of hospitals teaming with Syapse to establish OPN that will advance data sharing and speed development of personalized cancer treatments.

CHIME has named two winners of the "Concept Blitz Round" of the National Patient ID Challenge it launched with HeroX, selected from an initial round of eight finalists. A panel of five independent judges first narrowed the initial 113 entrants down to 23 semifinalists and then eight finalists. Of those, Michael Braithwaite, who has devised a scalable strategy that uses enhanced biometric information to match patients with their unique health data, and Mark Schroeder, who proposes to deploy HL7-approved standards to enable demographics and biometrics for patient ID – came out on top. Both won $30,000. The other six finalists were: Shawnnah Castillo; Kathryn Elaine; Bon Sy and Ayman Zeidan; and teams from Mathematica Policy Research, Spiral Nebula and RightPatient. Launched in January, the CHIME/HeroX challenge seeks innovative ways to help U.S. providers reliably, accurately, privately and safely identify patients. Speaking at HIMSS16 in Las Vegas this March, CHIME Board Chair Marc Probst, CIO at Intermountain Healthcare, called the lack of a dependable patient ID a "vexing problem" for healthcare with adverse effects on cost, efficiency, quality and safety. "Done right, a national patient ID will save lives," he said. [Also: ONC awards Boston Children's Hospital $275,000 to work on EHR apps discovery site] In a June 1 press statement, Probst said he was encouraged and excited by some of the innovative projects submitted to the Concept Blitz Round, with so many leveraging technology that already exists and won’t require wholesale disruption of today’s IT systems. That's critical to finding a tool that can be deployed across healthcare organizations of varying sizes and providers types, he said. "As patients increasingly seek care across the continuum, and data moves from one care setting to another, it is vital that we ensure patients are accurately identified and matched to their records." The patient ID challenge now moves into the Final Innovation Round – open from June 1 to November 10. Innovators were not required to take part in the Concept Blitz Round in order to enter the final round, but must register by July 12 to be eligible for the $1 million prize. With Johns Hopkins recently pointing to medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the U.S., the stakes are higher than ever for accurate patient matching, CHIME CEO Russ Branzell said in a statement. "We know that somewhere, right now, a patient is being harmed due to misidentification," he said. "We owe it to our patients to solve this problem once and for all. The solutions coming forward in this challenge are pointing us to a real solution." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

The new agreement will support the development of an online app information site aimed at streamlining a developer’s ability to publish software and helping providers discover and compare the tech.

Executives said that implementing the electronic health record system will enable it to add dialysis, rehabilitation, outpatient and substance abuse services that help the hospital grow.

During the "Future of Innovation" session at ONC's Annual meeting on May 31, three of the health IT industry's top leaders discussed the current interoperability landscape, offering perspectives on how it's evolving and assessing its potential.

Speak their language. Don’t talk too deeply about technology. But also remember to pitch the innovative ways that investing in security can improve the business, executives from Henry Ford, NIST, PwC, Texas Children's and others advise.

The new tool includes pricing and product limitation data to help make the process of selecting an electronic health record system less complex, according to National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD. 

Leading up to the initial phase, slated to begin in the Pacific Northwest, the Defense Department is focusing on configuration more than customization, and program executive Stacy Cummings said that change management will be paramount.

There needs to be a better business case for sharing data because consumers expect it and HIPAA allows it, said National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD. And Americans are growing increasingly impatient.