By Tony Cotterill – We love our acronyms in healthcare, don’t we? Even departments within the hospital often have their own names. Consider the differences between acronyms used in the billing department and those used by clinicians. But even clinicians in different specialties may not “speak” the same acronym language.
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By Alfred Hamilton, PhD, Angela Rivera & Gary Mann – Change is an inevitability for healthcare organizations. Increasingly complex environments call for organizations to undergo digital transformations as they become more reliant on software and technology. Improving operational efficiency, driving business growth, and meeting quality standards…
By Karen De Salvo MD & Andy Slavitt – Every day across America, health information technology professionals and development teams are creating interoperability solutions using APIs. As this surge of innovation grows with each passing year, the likelihood that teams across the nation are creating similar or duplicative health IT applications is also increasing.
The job will not be complete until all health records are digital and interoperable. Here’s what’s happening to make that reality: Orion Health and Koble-MN, Redox interoperating with EHRs, new DirectTrust partnership for patients program, and MedBridge partners with Raintree Systems.
By William Hersh – Raising a number of caveats about the enthusiasm for leveraging the growing volume of patient data in EHRs and other clinical information systems for so-called re-use of secondary use, such as clinical research, quality improvement, and public health.
Eight new members of the Health Information Technology Standards Committee and one new member to the Health Information Technology Policy Committee have been named to new terms. The two federal advisory committees were created through the HITECH Act in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
By Bob Grant – The Obama administration submitted its budget proposal for fiscal-year 2017. The OCR Budget in Brief details the increased budget–$1.15 trillion of which is allotted for HHS. $43 million of these funds will go to the Office for Civil Rights, and $82 million will go to the ONC.
By Andrew Gettinger MD – Safety is and always has been a top priority at ONC. We have incorporated safety into the ONC Health IT Certification Program and our guiding documents, the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan: 2015 – 2020 and Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap.
One of the ways that HITECH Answers is different from other media sites is the sense of community. The thought leaders in our community are good about sharing their thoughts on the issues of today. Here are the top read and shared guest posts of May.