Anthony Brino

The two long-time staffers, both former members of the military, replace two other long-time agency leaders and are overseeing the most significant health coverage and regulatory expansions in the agency's history.

In one of the first large-scale empirical studies on the links between HIE participation and imaging in hospital emergency departments, researchers found redundant CT scans, X-rays and ultrasounds decreased fairly significantly -- with savings in the millions of dollars.

Informaticists joined clinical quality experts in a brain storming session with new ONC chief Karen DeSalvo, exchanging ideas on developing the "next generation" of quality measures.

Karen DeSalvo, MD, appears to have the right background to understand the challenges facing the healthcare system. Beginning with her childhood experience as a public health clinic patient and including work as an internist managing a hospital's medical records committee, she has direct experience with the system at all levels.

Electronic health record incentive payments to eligible docs and hospitals continue to climb into the new year. The "inexorable progress" of the federal EHR incentive program continues, with payments to providers moving ever closer to $20 billion.

Caring for New Orleans' poor two decades ago, the new ONC leader found herself working in a system that "was really not what we should see for any person on the planet." After trying to reform that system post-Katrina, she's now taking on national problems.

With clinician dissatisfaction in EHR usability persisting, users and designers need to collaborate more -- and question the government and industry's assumptions on the best paths forward, Jacob Reider suggests.

With Congress working on a long-term Medicare "SGR fix" in the recent short-term budget deal, lawmakers laid down seeds for addressing issues such as value-based reimbursement and EHR compatibility.

In a year-end set of new regulations, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the HHS Inspector General finalized the Stark law exemption, which allows hospitals to fund up to 85 percent of EHR costs for physicians, and the OIG outlined the related anti-kickback "safe harbor" for "protected donors."

The technologist who helped bring the world Microsoft Word, Excel and other software that's now a part of modern personal and corporate life is taking on the vast challenge of managing the federal insurance marketplace.