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Letter to the Editor

We at Healthcare IT News, who depend on words as our life’s work, would never suggest that words don’t matter. We know that the words themselves matter. Sentence structure matters, and cadence matters. Getting it right matters most of all.

The Health IT Standards Committee and its twin Health IT Policy Committee, headed by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and created under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, began their work May 11.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told members of the House Ways and Means Committee last month that health reform is not contingent merely upon health IT adoption, but also on interoperability.

Information technology would push some healthcare reform plans discussed last month in what the White House called a “breakthrough” meeting between President Barack Obama and representatives of insurance companies, doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical firms.

When it comes to healthcare IT advancement, there is a lot riding on committees.

If providers delay their acquisition of an EHR until the federal government issues a definition of “meaningful use,” they’re wasting valuable time.

The American Academy of Family Physicians National Demonstration Project on the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) concluded almost a year ago, and as the project comes under evaluation experts have raised concerns and recommendations.

The recession has forced more than half the nation’s hospitals to either scale back information technology projects already in progress or postpone them, according to a new survey from the American Hospital Association.

In a state where healthcare has sometimes been delivered by telephone, snowmobile or even dogsled, a couple of recent IT implementations aim to make life a little bit easier.