Frank Irving

Judy Murphy, RN, director of the Office of Clinical Quality and Safety at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, is the latest in a long drumbeat of departures from the agency. Murphy will leave ONC to become chief nursing officer at IBM Healthcare Global Business Services.

Judy Murphy is leaving the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT for a job at IBM.

Frankfort Regional Medical Center has been serving the citizens of central Kentucky for nearly 40 years. The 175-bed acute care facility goes about its business of putting patients first while keeping up with the latest technological advances.

CIO Bernie Clement and Thibodaux Regional Medical Center are on a roll, winning a third consecutive Healthcare IT News "Best Hospital IT Departments" award.

The 19-person IT department, headed by Dwayne McKee, director of clinical informatics and business intelligence, handles implementation of all clinical and financial systems for the 275-bed organization. In fact, most members of the department have some level of clinical experience or exposure.

Attesting to Stage 2 meaningful use in 2014 may be difficult to come by for small and mid-sized provider groups, with one big reason being the electronic health record vendors' dilatory pace in actually upgrading their systems.

Nearly 90 percent of eligible hospitals have received an EHR incentive payment, according to figures shared by officials from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Monday at HIMSS14.

Due to the three-staged structure of the meaningful use timeline, eligible providers and hospitals have tended to approach the process in a literal, rigid way. But there's a change afoot, which some may call MU 2.0.

One in 20 meaningful use attesters will face an audit, and half of those will undergo a pre-payment audit. During educational session "Thriving on the Meaningful Use Audit -- Prepared Not Scared," attendees will learn how to face up to those odds.

As Karen DeSalvo, MD, prepares to take the reins as national coordinator for health information technology in 2014, here are 10 aspects of her background that may help define how she'll carry on the crucial work of her predecessors.