Health Information Exchange (HIE)
The American Telemedicine Association's 18th Annual International Meeting & Trade Show kicked off with a flourish on Sunday in Austin, Texas, as the trade organization works to drive adoption of distance-based care and prepare for rapid change as new virtual models are embraced.
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.
At the annual TEDMED conference on April 16, speakers in the opening session shared stories and innovative ideas on how big data could influence the future of medicine.
Among America's dichotomies: The country is widely-viewed as a leader in IT, yet the healthcare industry is notoriously perceived as lagging others in tech adoption. But is it really? To find out, Healthcare IT News Contributing Editor Tom Sullivan spoke with Medicomp Systems CEO David Lareau, who travels the globe and meets with healthcare customers in other nations.
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Farzad Mostashari and the federal Health IT Policy Committee on April 3 took a hard look at a new vendor-led coalition to promote interoperability, called the CommonWell Health Alliance.
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.
Making good on its promise, Health Level Seven International's primary standards and other intellectual property are now available to license at no cost. The decision represents HL7's commitment to the betterment of healthcare worldwide by ensuring that all stakeholders have equal access to its HIT standards, officials said.
Accountable care organizations might be today's hope for grappling with healthcare costs and bumping up quality, but according to one expert, they are doomed to fail without one key element.
In the third of three hearings held by subcommittees of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Farzad Mostashari, MD, reassured a congressional panel that health IT interoperability will take some dramatic leaps forward within the next two years.
Creating policy recommendations for HIE data query and response that reduces "real or perceived barriers," without being overly prescriptive, is the privacy and security "Tiger Team" subcommittee's task at hand in the coming months.