Anthony Brino

Much of the challenge nationally for bringing healthcare into the digital age, says outgoing ONC chief Farzad Mostashari, will be "getting to a common base of capabilities around the country, so that these providers...have some common assumption of what the capabilities of the systems will be around interoperability."

As the popular federal health IT leader prepares to leave his post, accountable care is making progress, but the ONC is also facing a challenging balancing act between supporting clinicians and regulating them.

With a $93 million federal loan, the cooperative Meritus Health Partners will appear alongside large national insurers on the federally-run insurance marketplace website.

Edith Ramirez, the Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission laid out the case for strong consumer protections regulating the private industry's use of big data, as the agency asks Congress for the power to level civil fines against businesses for weak consumer data security. Speaking at the Aspen Forum, Ramirez offered "A view from the lifeguard's chair."

As the Department of Health and Human Services invests $67 million in insurance exchange navigators and $150 million more in enrollment assistance, some attorneys general are raising privacy and fraud concerns, and looking for answers.

The ONC and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are both looking to the future and plotting long-term information exchange and interoperability policy strategies.

More than half of hospitals are sharing clinical information outside their affiliations. But two clinical data categories critical to care coordination still lag, ONC researchers found.

Healthcare organizations are struggling to find skilled workers, a surprising percentage are putting analytics efforts on a backburner for lack of talent, and that is holding them back from population health management techniques.

If state and federally-managed exchanges are going to be sustainably bringing Americans insurance over the next decade, these critical early challenges will have to be surpassed.

With an eagle-eyed watch on the implementation of a new Medicaid claims system in 2015, Montana's CIO Ron Baldwin says he wants the state's recently redesigned health and human services IT systems to last several decades. Which is why he is plotting the project similarly to how an urban planner might.