Government & Policy

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.

With digitization and interconnected devices come HIPAA compliance costs and a web of security issues. Organizations should thus be devoting extra scrutiny to vendors and designing security architectures from the get-go, one cyber-security analyst suggests.

Frequently, healthcare entities focus on how the EHR will work, rather than what frontline clinicians will do with it, which creates growing user frustration, extended adoption times and increased costs. But with proper planning, an effective paper to pixel transition is possible.

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.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) this year implemented pre-payment audits on Medicare and dually eligible -- Medicare and Medicaid -- providers participating in the EHR Incentive Programs. The audit programs target between 5 and 10 percent of eligible professionals attesting for meaningful use, according to Elizabeth Holland, director of the HIT Initiatives Group within CMS' Office of E-Health Standards and Services.

The Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have formed what they call a first-of-its-kind partnership with San Francisco-based healthcare modeling and analytics company Archimedes to provide free and easy access to CMS synthetic claims data for any software developer.

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.

John Loonsk, MD explains why Big Data and related tools might take longer than it presently appears to gain traction, be put into strategic use and ultimately fulfill its potential role in research and population health.

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.