Health Information Exchange (HIE)

IEEE Standards Association and Continua Health Alliance have signed a strategic agreement to help accelerate and broaden the adoption of globally relevant standards-based technologies for the healthcare arena. The idea is to enable widespread market implementation of end-to-end, plug-and-play personal medical devices.

Republican members of Congress are now moving up the chain of command to find who to hold accountable for failed launch of the Obamacare health insurance exchange website. Todd Park, chief technology officer of the U.S., is next on their list.

Anticipation about the IHE North American Connectathon's move to Cleveland in 2015 is running high among the event's organizers, though they insist that they are not looking past their final year in Chicago Jan. 27-31, 2014.

More than half of U.S. hospitals are currently connected to a regional, state or private health information exchange, with a majority of them citing this as their biggest challenge yet.

David Levin, MD, CMIO at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, discusses the challenges with meaningful use, data exchanges and the lack of "human factor" in health IT.

Mobile devices have found their way into virtually every corner of the world, even in the most remote and least technologically developed countries. And this reality, says Joan Cornet, mHealth director at Mobile World Capital in Barcelona, has a "huge impact" on the potential of mobile health going forward.

Though he no longer has authority over meaningful use regulations, former ONC chief Farzad Mostashari, MD, said that due to the nature of the federal regulatory process, it would be difficult to introduce more flexibility for complying with the Stage 2 rules.

HIMSS CEO H. Stephen Lieber spoke about the promise of health IT and collaboration Oct. 8 at the opening of the Global Center for Health Innovation in Cleveland, an initiative of local government, local healthcare providers, nonprofit organizations and health IT vendors that has been 10 years in the making.

Cleveland is a city that prides itself on being a city of firsts. HIMSS leaders are also used to firsts -- and to innovation and disruption. With their new HIMSS Innovation Center, they make no bones about their intent to shake things up in healthcare.

In a new role that will put his health IT expertise to work improving the performance of small physician practices, former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD, will join the Brookings Institution's Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform as a visiting fellow.