Bernie Monegain
HealthInfoNet, Maine’s statewide health information exchange (HIE) has achieved another first with the recent launch of image sharing. The pilot project puts both images and words at the fingertips of providers across the largely rural state.
Connect, link, exchange, share, go – a few verbs that lead to more verbs, such as care, decide, treat, recover, prevent. It must have been what health IT chief Farzad Mostashari, MD, had in mind when he told a packed auditorium of health IT pros at the annual HIMSS conference last February that he thinks of HIE as a verb.
The NQF Board of Directors has voted to stick to its decision to endorse a new all-cause hospital-wide readmissions measure developed by Yale University and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services -- a measure challenged by seven hospital systems.
Payer performance improvement remained flat in 2011, according to the seventh annual PayerView rankings released today by health IT company athenahealth. That's attributed in part to new compliance measures and major information technology shifts.
In real estate, it’s all about location, location, location, they say. In healthcare IT, you might say it’s about integration, integration, integration. Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman is keenly aware of how critical product integration is, he says, and he’s working on it. It’s the difficulties with integration that seem to have led to the EHR company’s recent troubles – at least it’s what Allscripts customers and analysts mention most often.
The New York eHealth Collaborative, the New York City Investment Fund and the New York State Department of Health have launched a $4.2 million program to foster health IT innovation and create 1,500 new jobs in the state.
It’s not business as usual, but more like rebooting at Allscripts headquarters now that the waves are beginning to settle after what some market analysts described as a “dismal” quarter for the electronic health record company.
It’s near the end of May, and any organization that had something to say about the government’s proposed rules for meaningful use of electronic health records, Stage 2, has said it.
There is room for improving how the government measures whether hospitals and physicians have met the requirements for meaningful use of EHRs to prevent improper payments, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Healthcare insurer Aetna is providing Banner Health Network full technology support for population health management and patient services for more than 200,000 patients.