Meaningful Use

IBM and Aetna subsidiary ActiveHealth Management, alongside Medens Corp., will deliver cloud services to help physicians in Puerto Rico share and exchange health information and make more accurate decisions about patient care.

Pediatrician and Harvard professor Donald Berwick, MD, chief of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services since July 12, went to Capitol Hill Wednesday to outline the agency's plans for making the programs stronger and more modern, in part by employing health information technology.

As it seeks to increase electronic health data sharing, Verizon will begin in January to issue free medical identity credentials to 2.3 million U.S. physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners.

Quality Partners of Rhode Island, whose focus is on healthcare quality improvement, has been selected to serve on the Health Information Technology Competency Taskforce, funded through the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has opened the doors to its innovation center, where it plans to test models of coordinated care for patients as well shared payments for healthcare providers in various real-world settings.

I read an interesting column about an octogenarian woman who lived by herself, despite multiple chronic conditions including congestive heart failure, arthritis, gout and glaucoma. Her health deteriorated rapidly last year and her primary caregiver, her daughter who lived two and a half hours away, was faced with putting her independent mother in an assisted-living facility.

The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) is slated to release updates on Dec. 16 to its Common Security Framework (CSF), which officials say is the most comprehensive and widely adopted security framework in the U.S. healthcare industry.

eHealthTrust opened its first large-scale health record bank (HRB), a secure repository where consumers can store and control their health information, in Phoenix last month. "We know the demand is there," said William Yasnoff, MD, founder of eHealthTrust, noting that thus far, a modest amount of local marketing to generate visibility has drawn "good reception from a small number of folks."

Hospitals across the country are on track to meet 2011 meaningful use criteria set by the federal government, according to new data from HIMSS Analytics.

Maine's regional extension center (REC) forum last week presented another good session for healthcare providers on how to making the transition from paper to electronic a seamless one.