Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)

Standards group Health Level Seven International (HL7) has formed the Clinical Quality Information Work Group. HL7 plans to offer more education to providers and the new work group will offer leadership in the development of standards artifacts and educational content to all stakeholders involved in quality measurement efforts.

The omnibus HIPAA Privacy and Security final rule released by HHS on Jan. 17 answered some questions, provided necessary guidance in certain areas -- but some of the thorniest issues, data breach notification among those, are still cryptic enough that lawyers and privacy officers will still face difficult judgment calls every time a laptop is lost or stolen.

Family physicians are adopting electronic health records at a much faster rate than previous data suggested, according to a new study from the Annals of Family Medicine. The adoption rate could exceed 80 percent by the end of 2013.

Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record payments are estimated to have blasted through $10.3 billion to a total of 180,200 physicians and hospitals through December since the program's inception. December's payments of $1.25 billion were driven by the largest amount of hospital payments for an individual month.

Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth announced Jan. 7 that it would acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates. It's a match hailed by the executives of both companies, and also by industry analysts, as a smart move. Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush explains his vision for athenahealth and for a connected healthcare system.

athenahealth is expanding its stronghold in the physician market with the announcement today that it would acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates, a mobile health company known for its point-of-care medical apps for physicians. The acquisition will accelerate athenahealth's vision to build the nation's health information backbone, executives say.

The year 2012 was the year when data showed its muscle, whether in the presidential elections or in demonstrating how deeply entrenched the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records had become.

Deborah Peel, MD, was trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst and worked as a psychiatrist in Austin, Texas, for nearly three decades before becoming a privacy activist, founding the group Patient Privacy Rights in 2006 after being appalled by HIPAA's evolution into what she sees as a weak baseline for privacy and security.

Once considered the leading edge of information technology, computerized physician order entry is now simmering on the back burner of healthcare priorities. While it is not forgotten, attention toward CPOE has been deflected in favor of other concerns, such as meaningful use, interoperability, RAC audits and ICD-10 coding projects. Yet it is a critical piece of meaningful use.

ACOs are an idea whose time has come, according to Gene Lindsey, MD, president and CEO of Newton, Mass.-based Atrius Health.