John Halamka

The Beth Israel Deaconess CIO looks back at the big events that shaped health IT in 2014 -- and ahead to what they portend for the coming year. "2014 was quite a year," he writes. "Thinking back to December 2013, I cannot believe that so much has happened."

Now that we have experience with two stages of meaningful use, it's also clear that a three year cycle is needed to ensure safe, high value, well adopted, introduction of new IT functionality.

After nearly 20 years as a CIO, I've learned that even with the best people, best planning and appropriate budgets, large, complex projects encounter issues imposed by external factors that cannot be predicted during initial project scheduling.

In the Boston marketplace, Partners Healthcare is is replacing 30 years of self developed software with Epic. Boston Medical Center is replacing Eclipsys (Allscripts) with Epic.

Last week my mother fell and broke her hip. She was taken to a very good local hospital and received excellent orthopedic care.

In my recent Top 10 EHR Barriers blog, I identified usability of EHR software as a key issue. It appears that NIST, with ARRA funding and ONC guidance is doing something about it.