Government & Policy

Robert Jarrin, senior director of government affairs at Qualcomm Incorporated -- like most people involved in the mHealth world -- is waiting with bated breath for the Food and Drug Administration to finalize its mobile medical apps guidance.

Axial Exchange, a developer of patient engagement technologies, unveiled this week its Patient Engagement Index, which ranks U.S. hospitals based on how involved their patient communities are with their own care.

Although HIE "is advancing rapidly" in much of the country, "it is being held back by demand--and supply-side friction created by variation in federal and state programs and policies that give unequal and sometimes conflicting emphasis on interoperability," Micky Tripathi, Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative president and the federal Health IT Policy Committee's HIE workgroup chair told the panel April 3.

For 15 years, Congress has bestowed special privileges to some small remote hospitals, usually in rural areas, to help them stay afloat. Medicare pays them more than it pays most hospitals and exempts them from financial pressure to operate efficiently and requirements to reveal how their patients fare. Nearly one in four hospitals qualifies for the program. Despite these benefits, there's new evidence that the quality of many of these hospitals may be deteriorating.

Dubbing it "the next great American project," President Barack Obama announced the launch of the BRAIN Initiative, aimed at unlocking the many mysteries of the brain. The $100 million "to get the project off the ground" comes from the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, and is part of the budget the president will send to Congress next week.

Dan Diamond ran a triage unit in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and was in-country immediately after the earthquake struck Haiti. The difference between available mobile technologies for each disaster was like night and day, but there are still some apps and tools he said would be really helpful.

Much like learning how to ride a bike, the early experience with electronic health records involves falls and scrapes. And as the industry turns its focus toward more usable EHRs, we should look beyond just making health IT systems simpler.

Hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries in almost 100 counties across the United States and its territories will be losing coverage for telehealth services because they no longer live in federally designated rural areas. As a result of the 2010 Census, 97 counties in 36 states and territories are being redefined as metropolitan, rather than rural.

The HIPAA Privacy and Security final rule -- also known as the HIPAA Omnibus Rule -- became effective March 26. One expert predicts enforcers will have a heyday with expanded ability to crack down on providers and their business associates.

Pulse8 CEO John Criswell sees plenty of opportunity to harness the information that HIXs and HIEs will have as a means for both bending the cost curve and bettering care quality.