Government & Policy

"Please tell Speaker Boehner, Chairman Fred Upton, and Chairman Pete Sessions that you want to add the ICD-10 delay to a must-pass piece of legislation during the upcoming 2014 lame duck session," is the most recent call to action put forth by opponents of ICD-10.

Offering a bit of leeway, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has pushed out the deadline for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals to attest to meaningful use for the 2014 reporting year, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 31.

With cybercrime increasingly on the rise and the Office for Civil Rights embarking on more audits there are ways to ratchet your security efforts up a notch.

There is no turning back from data anymore, and now is the time to embrace it, federal health leaders say.

A report from the Office of Inspector General outlines the top challenges faced by the Department of Health and Human Services in FY 2014. Among them: meaningful use and interoperability. OIG also highlighted several area HHS continues to struggle with heading into 2015, including electronic health records.

Earlier this month, we reported how healthcare is increasingly embracing a new C-suite position: chief data officer. Now, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is getting in on the act, with the appointment of its first CDO, Niall Brennan.

In case anyone was still wondering about a leadership vacuum at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Karen DeSalvo, MD, is still national coordinator -- a fact that was in evidence Wednesday at the close of the American Medical Informatics Association's annual conference.

As industries of all types recognize the importance of data, a new role is emerging in healthcare to harness that information and make it integral to business strategy and execution. Seattle Children's Eugene Kolker is one such Chief Data Officer.

In most of the country, it is still nearly impossible to compare the price and quality of anything in healthcare. Websites that mine such data are springing up to fill the void. But thanks to a law enacted in October, Massachusetts health insurers now have to make all their prices public -- in advance.

A fresh batch of disheartening Stage 2 attestation numbers has prompted several industry groups to once again implore the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to shorten the meaningful use reporting period in 2015 and offer more leeway on some of its more problematic measures.