EHR

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will announce the names of the authorized testing and certification bodies (ATCB) "soon," according to Carol Bean, ONC's division director for certification and testing.

Christiana Care Health System a private, not-for-profit tertiary-care hospital system with locations in Wilmington and Newark, Del., has announced two major initiatives that aim to drive healthcare IT adoption.

There's a sense of relief across the industry that the just-unveiled meaningful use criteria are less stringent than many had feared, striking the right note between rules-based accountability and the freedom needed to foster wider implementation.

In July, the Leapfrog Group released a report on computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems that contained some discouraging findings.

Information technology is an integral part of the agreement between Commonwealth Hematology-Oncology (CHO), the largest community-based private cancer practice in New England, and Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), which seeks to provide cancer patients with greater resources, closer to home.

Electronic health record systems could give rise to increased liability for healthcare providers, according to professors from Case Western Reserve University.

The increasing adoption of EHRs and other digital technologies by primary care physicians and specialists points to trends expected to help create "dramatic upswings in doctors' case loads," according to a new survey by research company Knowledge Networks.

Just one year after its launch, officials at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report that 57 percent of patients and 40 percent of referring community physicians are using its Web-based portal for personal health information.

Hospital CIOs across the country reviewed the final rule on meaningful use of health IT with some relief that the government had given up its all-or-nothing approach.

Federal officials released the final rule on meaningful use July 13, a rule sets the criteria for physicians and hospitals to qualify for thousands of dollars in stimulus funding incentives for the adoption of electronic health records.