Government & Policy
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.
Ed Ricks, CIO of Beaufort Memorial Hospital in South Carolina, discusses the impact of health reform on health IT with Healthcare IT News Associate Editor Erin McCann.
Saying that the proposed legislation would address "the failure of DoD and VA to develop a single unified medical record," one of the bill's backers explains that it would require VA and DoD to prove they are implementing a plan for that single medical record.
Members of Congress are lauding a bipartisan bill that limits funding for an integrated electronic health record system between VA and DoD and requires aggressive progress updates from both agencies, which have, in recent months, come under fire for the dilatory pace at which they're moving forward with the iEHR.
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."
American Telemedicine Association President-Elect Ed Brown, MD is the founder and CEO of Ontario Telemedicine Network in Canada. Healthcare IT News caught up with him at the recent ATA conference in Austin, Texas, to talk with him about the state of telemedicine and what he envisions it will be in the coming years.
The promise of HIEs to provide insights across the continuum of care that can dramatically alter the health of populations is emerging as among the most significant reasons for exchanging health data.
An update to the Hospital Safety Score that assigns grades "A" through "F" to more than 2,500 hospitals in the United States shows they have made only incremental progress in addressing errors, accidents, injuries and infections that kill or hurt their patients. The Leapfrog Group, a hospital watchdog group, conducts the surveys.
The ONC Policy Committee's Privacy and Security team says there's no need for limitations on providers trying to locate patient record for direct treatment, aside from patient choice. The issue does raise some policy questions, though, and the Committee asked for a reformulation of the team's suggestions.