News
With so much of America's healthcare future on the line after the election - partisan budget battles looming and talk of either moving forward with Obamacare or starting over under President Romney (depending what has happened at the ballot box by the time you read this) - one thing has stayed relatively stable over the past eight years, and hopefully will continue to: the bipartisan advancement of healthcare IT.
One of the concepts occupying my mind is that of automated care. The last time I wrote about automated care was February of 2011 (Emotional Automation, Revisited). Lately I've been thinking about it more and more. The burden of chronic illness continues to rise and the size of the provider workforce is not keeping up. This manifests as overworked, unhappy providers, particularly in primary care.
The October 4 letter four House leaders to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calling for a halt to the government's EHR Incentive Program seems to have come out of the blue.
The U.S. is making strong and fast headway on the adoption of electronic health records, said National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Farzad Mostashari, MD, at a recent event in Washington, D.C.
Federal campaign builds usership to 1 million
Data exchange makes strides, but much work remains
What parties are doing (or should be doing) to protect patient privacy in a digital age.
Moving the meaningful use of health IT forward has called for an increase in the workforce to provide doctors and hospitals with help establishing their EHRs.
A long, long time ago, way back in 2007, "presidential candidates in both parties were pledging to boost health IT," writes TIME magazine reporter Michael Grunwald in his book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (Simon & Schuster). "Several bipartisan bills were floating around Congress, and Hillary and Newt Gingrich were both hailing electronic medicine as the future of healthcare."
When the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently selected Aegis.Net to establish a health IT test standard and interoperability as part of meaningful use of electronic health records, it highlighted the rising importance of interoperability testing.