By John Halamka MD – On May 19th, I spent the day in Washington with a group of government, provider, and developer stakeholders convened by the IHI. We operated under Chatham House Rules, so I can summarize the discussion but not identify any of the participants or their specific statements. Here are three questions we discussed and the observations we made.
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By John Halamka – In my blog posts, I speak from the heart without a specific political or economic motivation. Although I’ve not written about highly controversial subjects such as religion, gun control, or reproductive policy, some of the topics in my posts can be polarizing. Such as was the case with MACRA.
By John Halamka MD – As promised, I’ve read and taken detailed notes on the entire 962 page MACRA NPRM so that you will not have to. Although this post is long, it is better than the 20 hours of reading I had to do! Here is everything you need to know from an IT perspective about the MACRA NPRM.
By John Halamka MD – In my 20 years as a CIO, my expertise has evolved to include infrastructure provisioning, software architecture, strategic planning, mobile application advocacy and cloud procurement. However, in recent years, my focus has been guided by privacy and security risk mitigation.
By Dr. Larry Garber response to the HHS request for an assessment of interoperability needed to support MACRA. I am writing as a practicing physician, an implementer of EHRs, a designer/developer/director of EHRs and health information exchanges (HIEs), and a participant in standards development processes.
By John Halamka MD – On March 29th I read a New York Times article about a possible successor to Bitcoin called Ethereum, which provides a distributed database (no central repository) for the purpose of tracking financial transactions. I immediately thought of the challenge we have turning silos of medical information into a linked, complete, accurate, secure, lifetime medical record.
By Manu Tandon – Population health conversation last year was about maximizing revenue for the organization. Now it’s about identifying and managing cohorts of patients using patient generate data as a source. The best thinking we saw aligns very well with ours.
By John Halamka MD – Every year I walk the HIMSS floor and speak at HIMSS events with the hope that I can distill the conference sensory overload into a few key themes. In the recent past, big data, interoperability, personalized medicine, population health, and wearables were buzzwords in every booth. This year, the buzzwords were replaced by one overarching concept – providers and vendors must innovate or die.
By John Halamka MD – Communicating the IT strategic plan is one of the primary responsibilities of a CIO. Most importantly, the IT strategic plan should be seen as an enterprise wide activity and not just an IT centric exercise. IT should be an enabler for the strategy of the business and every IT tactic should tie back to a high priority of the business.