On Tuesday, congressional leaders continued to urge the Obama administration to immediately adopt Meaningful Use Stage 2 modifications and delay final rulemaking for Meaningful Use Stage 3 no sooner than January 1, 2017. The call from U.S. Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) comes as a bipartisan group of 96 Republicans and 20 Democrats in the House of Representatives in a separate letter to the administration urged it to “pause” the process of making stage three
Read More
Health IT Interoperability| News, Policy, Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Information Blocking in Health IT: Myth or Reality?
Editor's Note: Irv Lichtenwald is president and CEO of Medsphere Systems Corporation, the solution provider for the OpenVista electronic health record. Prior to joining Medsphere, he served as CFO of Advent Software, a leading provider of investment management solutions. Between 1995 and 2003, Irv led Advent through three public stock offerings. Do we believe in something we can’t see? The suggestion has been made that some vendors are actively engaged in “information
Read More
Report: Healthcare Interoperability Gets Failing Grade
A national physician survey of nearly 3,000 physicians who use the Epocrates medical reference app reveal that 95% of physicians have experienced a delay or difficulty delivering medical care because patients’ health records were not easily accessible or shared. The Epocrates study, prepared by athenahealth finds only 14% of physicians can actually access electronic health information across all care settings. Given the nearly unanimous frustration over the lack of helathcare
Read More
Epic to Waive Record Sharing Fees
EHR leader Epic announced this week during HIMSS15 that it will no longer charge a fee to exchange patient records between Epic customers and non-Epic customers through a module formerly called Care Elsewhere, Modern Healthcare first reports. Data sharing services with Non-Epic customers have since been bundled into Epic's other interoperability module, Care Everywhere. “We're not going to charge for Care Everywhere for at least until 2020,”said Epic CEO Judy Faulkner in an interview
Read More
Is Machine Interoperability the Next Unusable Level of Meaningful Use?
As the HIMSS15 extravaganza is getting under way, and every EHR vendor flush with cash from the Meaningful Use bonanza is preparing to take its unusable product to the next level, machine interoperability is shaping up to be the belle of the ball. Interoperability in health care is all the rage now. After publishing a ten year interoperability plan, which according to the Federal Trade Commission(FTC) is well position to protect us from wanton market competition and heretic innovations, the
Read More
The Kabuki Dance Of “Blocking Data” In Healthcare
The lack of data interoperability in healthcare continues to plague and haunt the entire industry. Much of the challenge falls squarely in the realm of Electronic Health Record (EHR) software, but EHR software is by no means the only category where this challenge is directly affecting patient lives. I ‒ along with countless others ‒ have written extensively about this topic. Last year I did a 5‒part series on just "interoperability" which I published on Forbes. One piece highlighted the
Read More
HIMSS Launches EHR/HIE Interoperability Testing & Certification Program
HIMSS has announced the launch of a new testing and certification program called ConCert by HIMSS designed to streamline the certification of interoperability in health IT and helps evaluate vendor claims, simplifying the task of selecting the right information systems for your organization. Built on the work of the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup (IWG) and IHE USA, ConCert by HIMSS is a robust, highly automated testing and certification program that will verify, once certified, a product
Read More
HIMSS15: AMA President Unveils Physician Leadership Plan For Digital Health
The game-changing digital health transformation of medicine is emerging into a new phase, according to Robert M. Wah, M.D., president of the American Medical Association (AMA), and there is reason for great optimism in the future of this evolution as the AMA helps physicians take on a greater role in leading changes that will move technological innovations forward. Today, in his keynote address to the 2015 Annual HIMSS Conference Innovation Symposium in Chicago, Dr. Wah discussed the AMA’s
Read More
Carequality Publishes Trust Principles for Secure Interoperability
Carequality has announced the publication of the Carequality Trust Principles, the policy foundation for connecting health data sharing networks throughout the U.S. Carequality, a Healtheway initiative, is a public-private collaborative supporting nationwide health IT interoperability to accomplish in healthcare what the telecommunications industry did to link cell phone networks. The Carequality community that has come together to develop and implement the principles includes representatives
Read More
Inside The Secret Life of Your Healthcare Data
There’s a rising tide of healthcare data. It lifts many hopes for better healthcare, but also surfaces one troubling issue: reliability of data. Just how confident are you of the reliability of your data? As a healthcare provider, you already know that data permeates your office workload. This impacts a critical feature of your operations: your workflow, a process you probably evolved over many years. Suddenly, you’re now doing “refreshes” to accommodate the new data volumes you’re
Read More
