Erin McCann
Everyone likes a good competition, particularly with a potential $9 million gold carrot available to the victors. On Jan. 9, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced a challenge for software developers to create a new medical scheduling system for VA's nationwide health system.
A new research partnership between Mayo Clinic and Optum - the health IT arm of UnitedHealth - will bring together more than 105 million clinical and claims records for the purpose of improving quality metrics in healthcare.
With numerous electronic health record systems continuing to fall short of providers' expectations, a report by Black Book Rankings suggests that 2013 may indeed be the "year of the great EHR vendor switch."
The idea of unique patient identifiers (UPIs) could very well be reality in the not-so-distant future. Despite the current standstill at the federal level, other efforts to implement UPIs are very much moving forward.
Already this year, healthcare providers have launched 106 new accountable care organizations (ACOs) that will reach as many as four million beneficiaries, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Jan. 10.
Family physicians are adopting electronic health records (EHRs) at a much faster rate than earlier data suggested, reaching a nearly 70 percent adoption rate nationwide, new study findings reveal.
2013 has already proved to be a big year for patient privacy. HHS released the long-awaited HIPAA final rule. Legislation that would regulate how mHealth app developers collect data was drafted. And the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) started the year off with stricter enforcement relating to privacy breaches.
Board members at the St. Paul, Minn.-based HealthEast Care System have unanimously approved a five-year $135 million budget to build a new electronic health record (EHR) system.
A new House bill introduced on Dec. 30 that would expand telehealth services in Medicare and Medicaid programs has garnered the support of the American Telemedicine Association.
The idea of unique patient identifiers is more than a mere concept extracted from the next dystopian novel. They could very well be reality in the not-so-distant future. The question remaining, however, is whether or not the benefits of such technology outweigh constitutional privacy and patient trust concerns. Naturally, depending on whom you ask, the answer varies considerably.