Government & Policy

In the morning, the U.S. House postponed the vote on delaying ICD-10 to 2015 and on a temporary fix to how doctors are paid, but by afternoon, House members came back around and voted to pass the bill. It now goes to the Senate.

Under the guise of the already contentious SGR fix, Congress is girding to vote on a bill Thursday that would delay ICD-10. AHIMA has written a letter, urging Congress to stay the course to the Oct. 1 deadline.

A group of senators are now urging the Food and Drug Administration to provide clarification on how the agency would classify mobile applications.

How one CMIO instituted a "one note per day per patient" policy to help his health network get the most bang from its EHR buck.

While the U.S. continues digitizing its healthcare industry, a huge challenge is arising: not only securing those systems but verifying identities. With a steady stream of HIPAA-covered data breaches continuing over the past few years, some argue that current identity security approaches just aren't adequate.

The panel hasn't had a meeting and no one's even been nominated for it yet, but the Obama administration's fiscal 2015 budget request says the health law's Independent Payment Advisory Board, also known as IPAB, could save the government triple what officials estimated last year.

One thing became clear in 2013: All leaders across the health system have been challenged to keep pace with change, and the best of them have been driving change. In a year of active mergers and acquisitions, many healthcare organizations need leadership that can facilitate change across complex organizations.

Members of the Health IT Policy Committee approved a set of recommendations Tuesday that will bring meaningful use Stage 3 requirements one step closer to federal approval and scale back the initial Stage 3 proposals by 33 percent.

The HIT Policy Committee is engaging a leaner, more focused set of recommendations for meaningful use Stage 3.

In the first settlement of its kind, Skagit County, Washington will pay the Department of Health and Human Services $215,000 to make up for deficiencies in its HIPAA compliance program.