OIG: Health IT remains a top challenge facing HHS

Health information technology remains a top management and performance challenge confronting the Department of Health and Human Services, as the healthcare industry attempts to leverage the universal adoption of electronic health records and achieve true EHR interoperability.

That’s the contention of the HHS Office of the Inspector General, which ranked health IT third overall in its annual ranking of the department’s top 10 management and performance challenges.

Specifically, auditors expressed their concerns about the meaningful, secure exchange and use of electronic information—not just for HHS but also the overall U.S. healthcare system, which increasingly rely on such data. For the full article click here 

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A Pioneering Spanish CIO Shares his Perspectives on the New Healthcare

In western Europe, as in the United States, IT-facilitated clinical transformation remains a work in progress, with tremendous variations by geography and by type of patient care organization. One organization in Spain that has made tremendous strides—and which became one of the first European hospital organizations to receive “stage 7” recognition from the HIMSS Analytics division of the Chicago-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), per its EMRAM schematic around electronic health record (EHR) development—is the Hospital Marina Salud de Dénia in the suburb of Valencia called Dénia, on the east coast of Spain. Indeed, the leaders of the hospital received the prestigious Davies Award from HIMSS in 2015, and the hospital’s CIO, Vicent Moncho Mas, was presented with the award at HIMSS’ World of Health IT conference in Riga, Latvia, that year.

Moncho Mas spoke of the journey into digitization and clinical transformation on Tuesday, Nov. 22, at World of Health IT 2016 (WoHIT2016), being held this week at the Centre de Conveniones Internacional de Barcelona (CCIB), in Barcelona, Spain. For the full article click here 

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4 things we learned from the annual ONC report on health IT

Thanksgiving is Thursday here in the U.S., which, for those of us in the publishing business, means it is a slow news week. So we amuse ourselves reading things like health IT reports from the federal government.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology this week released its annual report on health IT to Congress, as required by the 2009 HITECH Act. That’s the law that ushered in Meaningful Use in 2011.

There’s a lot of usual language in the report, talking about all the health IT programs and initiatives and standards ONC has launched or endorsed in the last 12 months, plus, of course, some interesting data. Here are four interesting things we learned from reading the document For the full article click here 

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3 Health Information Exchanges Make Health IT Investments

3 Health Information Exchanges Make Health IT Investments

New ‘Cures’ language coming soon

UPDATED 21ST CENTURY CURES BILL IMMINENT: The wait is over, or almost. A revised version of the 21st Century Cure Act might be released as soon as today in preparation of a House floor vote next week, sources on and off the Hill are telling Morning eHealth. The bill has been on hold for almost the entire year as Republicans and Democrats haggled over how to offset increases in NIH spending and funding for the cancer moonshot, Precision Medicine and opioid prevention and treatment. But Energy and Commerce Chair Fred Upton said last week a deal had been struck, and the rest of the world will see the fruits of their labor any time now. Lawmakers were trying to create a reconciled bill to pass through both chambers of a lame-duck Congress.

Some health IT things to watch:Check out our Pro Health Care colleagues for more pharma-centric coverage, but here’s a refresher on what eHealth items of interest:
— Definitions of interoperability – (the House bill was more specific)
— Interoperability standards – the House would contract with a standards-development organization to develop them; the Senate tries to create a trusted exchange framework
— TRUST IT Act – Sen. Bill Cassidy’s proposal to create a star-ratings system of EHRs wasn’t well received in the House, so its status in a reconciled bill is uncertain For the full article click here

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Is protectionism hurting health IT innovation?

The results of the U.S. election this month have got me thinking about protectionism.  Webster’s Dictionary defines protectionism as: “the theory or practice of shielding a country’s domestic industries from foreign competition by taxing imports.”  Advocates for a global trade system are obviously opposed to this idea and many attest that even though the strategy seems like a good idea at the time, in the long term it will never really work out.

So why am I discussing foreign policy strategies? I’m a data scientist and eHealth advocate after all. I bring it up because protectionism is exactly what is being practiced throughout the healthcare industry and it is systematically killing healthcare innovation. For the full article click here 

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