Interoperability
PwC US announced on Friday it would put in a bid for the Department of Defense EHR contract, proposing an open source system. The PwC team would go head-to-head with IBM and Epic, which are also bidding on the project. Epic is among the most widely adopted EHR systems in the country.
After it was reported that U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park was leaving his post, immediate speculation was that a Googler and a Twitter attorney were in the running to succeed him. Turns out: President Obama hired both.
In part two of his Healthcare IT News Q&A, Micky Tripathi lays out the ways interoperability can finally be brought to fruition in the U.S. over the coming decade. Hint: the federal government and the private sector each have big jobs to do.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has been reshaping itself for the future and is working on its strategic plan alongside a 10-year roadmap for interoperability -- and that is against the backdrop of health IT reports put out by other federal entities, notably JASON and PCAST.
Micky Tripathi talks about the JASON Task Force, the market pressures pushing for data sharing and the way forward for health information exchange.
U.S. chief technology officer Todd Park is reportedly packing up to head back West -- Silicon Valley, specifically.
In testimony before ONC's Health IT Policy Committee on Aug. 15, Epic President Carl Dvorak made his case that the EHR giant is far more engaged with data sharing than some critics would contend.
The message that Allscripts Healthcare Solutions CEO and President Paul Black wants to share is simple. "We are back. We are doing well," Black said Wednesday in opening the annual Allscripts Client Experience -- ACE -- users' conference at the McCormick Place convention center.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported a new batch of meaningful use attestation numbers on Wednesday, showing a modest improvement over the disappointing rates that were reported in July.
For the moment, at least, it seems Stage 2 meaningful use is just too difficult for most hospitals and practices to manage. With attestation numbers disappointingly low through the first half of 2014, can we expect to see an appreciable uptick in success stories by the end of the year? One observer's opinion: "probably not."