Meaningful Use
Meaningful use criteria gets the ball rolling.
Every year, the HIMSS annual conference has provided a milestone on our journey toward a future of HIT-assisted healthcare. Every year we’ve seen progress. Yet past years have been marked by the stubborn gap between the potential we perceive for HIT-assisted care and a sluggish rate of adoption among providers.
This February, I'll be attending my eighth HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition. Back in 2004, the industry was fairly new to me, although I had written about both healthcare and information technology for other publications. But it was a thrilling time to begin a new career, not least because, as one headline in the HIMSS Show Daily put it, "Suddenly, EHR is the talk of D.C."
David Blumenthal, MD, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, is stepping down from the helm at ONC this spring, the office confirmed Thursday.
Increasing electronic access to patient records, support for meaningful use incentives and privacy safeguards are some of the health IT priorities that doctors and patients can agree on, according to a national survey released Monday by the Markle Foundation.
Even as President Obama gave a State of the Union address this week in which he celebrated an emerging healthcare system where "patients will be able to have face-to-face video chats with their doctors" and "veterans can download their electronic medical records with a click of the mouse," many Republican lawmakers were rallying around a bill that imperils funding for meaningful use incentives.
The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology has announced that EHR technology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston has been certified as a complete EHR under CCHIT's new EHR Alternative Certification for Hospitals (EACH), an ONC-ATCB certification program for installed hospital EHR technology.
The government's healthcare fraud prevention and enforcement efforts recovered more than $4 billion in taxpayer dollars for the Medicare, Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in 2010, the largest sum ever recovered in a single year, according to findings published in the government's Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program (HCFAC) report.
As hospitals and health systems across the country grapple with achieving meaningful use of electronic medical records, Accenture is the latest to offer a survey on how they are doing. This one is a survey of CIOs from health systems with advanced use of EMRs, and one of the key findings is that most health systems underestimate the time and cost of implementation.
The charter tenants for Cleveland Medical Mart & Convention Center (Cleveland MMCC) were introduced this past Friday, at a groundbreaking held in front of more than 600 business, civic, community, and political leaders.