Interoperability

National Health IT Week kicked off this Monday in Washington, DC, with a litany of prepared speeches and big names in the health IT arena. Among the overarching themes? Interoperability and patient engagement.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has appointed Lana Moriarty to be the new head of its Consumer eHealth division.

Outsourcing company Cognizant, which provides healthcare technology services to providers and payers, will buy health IT software company TriZetto for $2.7 billion in cash, with the intent to better position itself in the market and take advantage of changes taking place in the sector.

Electronic health record behemoth Epic Systems has inked a deal with a lobbying firm to work on its interoperability image -- one that has left a perception that Epic has a closed system that does not easily work well with other EHR systems.

CMS and ONC disappointed many CIOs and IT teams around the country on Aug. 29 when it issued a final rule for Stage 2 meaningful use that lacked the flexibility on reporting that so many had counted on -- and perhaps expected, because what they had proposed seemed like a reasonable compromise to them.

With the war already underway, how can hospitals and networks prepare? Chief information security officers share insights about shifting toward more sophisticated information security tactics.

When the Office for Civil Rights knocks on your door, asking about HIPAA compliance, it pays to be ready. And OCR is looking to audit providers ranging from large to small, and across a wide geographical distribution.

PwC US announced on Friday it would put in a bid for the Department of Defense EHR contract, proposing an open source system. The PwC team would go head-to-head with IBM and Epic, which are also bidding on the project. Epic is among the most widely adopted EHR systems in the country.

HealthCare.gov, the government's insurance enrollment website, was breached in July by a hacker or hackers, according to CMS officials at a briefing on Thursday. The officials said that while the intruders uploaded malware, they took no personal information.

After looking at all the possible options, Denver-based National Jewish Health decided to go in-house to develop its patient portal, and that's without a major push.