Health Information Exchange (HIE)
The two-day conference in Boston, hosted by Partners Healthcare's Center for Connected Health, brings together more than 1,000 experts to discuss new technologies and concepts.
Gary and Mary West, co-founders of the West Wireless Health Institute, announced Oct. 19 the formation of a $100 million investment fund with a mission to lower healthcare costs. The West Health Investment Fund, LLC was created to spur the development and adoption of healthcare innovations specifically focused on making healthcare more affordable.
The American College of Physicians, which represents 132,000 internal medicine specialists, is proposing a privacy rule that says researchers should maximize appropriate uses of information to achieve scientific advances without compromising ethical obligations to protect individual welfare and privacy.
The U.S. healthcare system scored 64 of a possible 100 on key measures of performance, according to the third national scorecard report from the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System. The report also reveals a poor score on measures of efficiency, showing relatively low use of electronic information systems and high administrative costs.
Eastern Connecticut Health Network, Inc. (ECHN) is building an HIE, and the health system has tapped MobileMD to help get the job done, signing a five-year agreement.
Eighteen California hospitals, health systems, clinics and physician groups -- many of them catering to underserved populations -- will receive grants totaling nearly $20 million from Blue Shield of California to help them participate more effectively in accountable care organizations (ACOs).
Orion Health will acquire Microsoft's hospital information system (HIS) software assets, including RIS/PACS, previously known as Amalga HIS. The two companies will also collaborate to co-market their health information exchange and data aggregation and analysis products.
Within the past month, 14 critical access hospitals have joined the Nebraska Health Information Initiative (NeHII), Nebraska's statewide health information exchange.
Small and resource-poor, the Western Washington Rural Health Care Collaborative (WWRHCC), has shown it is not afraid to tackle - and complete - big projects, such as building an HIE from scratch and developing a telepharmacy system.
The title of this commentary is pure jargon, but does express the issue at hand. An alternative title "The Most Important Health Policy Decision Hidden as an Obscure Health IT Technical Evaluation that You May Never Have Heard of," would have also been accurate, but is grammatically unsound and too flippant for an important subject.