Patty Enrado

Aneesh Chopra, the nation's chief technology officer, appealed to the Health 2.0 community this week to help bring "game-changing innovation" to healthcare.

The health information exchange (HIE) landscape is changing rapidly since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), according to one healthcare consultant.

The federal stimulus incentives to adopt health IT are a "nice add-on," however they are not driving hospitals' overall IT initiatives, hospital executives said last week at a healthcare summit here.

Traditional disease management has historically been treated and tracked by condition with separate departmental IT systems.

Prior to the 2008 passage of the Long-Term Care Community Choices Act, Tennessee was spending 99 percent of its Medicaid long-term care dollars on nursing homes instead of home-based services.

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield’s $100 million integrated claims system and supporting software implementation was completed last August on budget and within a year of rollout.

Independence Blue Cross (IBC) plans to increase the type and sophistication of clinical alerts that it has been delivering to its network physicians since April.

Shared Health is slated to begin rolling out in December a solution that would give Mississippi Medicaid providers a Web-based electronic health record system and e-prescribing capability.

The Delaware Health Information Network, live since March 2007 and a participant in the Nationwide Health Information Network trial implementations, is now preparing for its next transition.

Federal stimulus funding is driving electronic medical record implementations, and state and local governments are increasing their health IT budgets, according to recent reports.