Tom Sullivan
The Beacon Communities proved that organizations can advocate changes to how healthcare is paid for by working with payers and providers, while improving quality and safety at the same time. "These were the pillars of the Beacon Community activities, and they taught us," National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD, said. "They showed what we needed to do."
Marilyn Tavenner's confirmation as official administrator of CMS immediately drew positive reactions from nearly every corner of the industry and government, as several healthcare stakeholders reacted to the 91-7 landslide Senate vote that took place late Wednesday. Tavenner is the first administrator in nine years to receive Senate confirmation.
Has OMB lost its way toward the ambitious, if not sprawling, datacenter consolidation and Cloud-First initiatives?
"It's systems that let ordinary people do extraordinary things," national coordinator for health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD said during a Health IT Policy Committee meeting talk that vice chair Paul Tang described immediately afterward as "inspiring and challenging."
Continuing the upward trajectory of EHR reimbursements flowing out into the healthcare industry, CMS said on Tuesday morning that the total paid as of March's end is more than $13.7 billion.
Having spent more than 15 years in pure IT work, Robert Reedy looked into ONC's program to train IT pros for healthcare and found a new career, replete with continuing job offers.
Can the current regulatory structure in place within the federal government keep pace with health IT without inhibiting innovation? A difficult question to answer, indeed, particularly in light of what National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD, calls a "seismic shift" under way in three aspects of healthcare: how it's paid for, how it's delivered and how patients engage in their own care.
Evoking the "network of networks" notion, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) has unwrapped a pair of funding initiatives designed to ratchet up large-scale comparative effectiveness research with patients at the center.
Two cooperative opportunities will drive a hybrid approach of comparative effectiveness research that includes a broad array of participants, including patients and researchers, that hold the potential to enable patients with actionable information.
Among America's dichotomies: The country is widely-viewed as a leader in IT, yet the healthcare industry is notoriously perceived as lagging others in tech adoption. But is it really? To find out, Healthcare IT News Contributing Editor Tom Sullivan spoke with Medicomp Systems CEO David Lareau, who travels the globe and meets with healthcare customers in other nations.