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The Subcommittee on Health of the House Energy and Commerce Committee  held a hearing on Tuesday, July 27, 2010, in 2322 Rayburn House Office Building entitled “Implementation of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health. Reported Emily Long at NextGov : Members of the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee questioned whether health care providers will run out and purchase new technology knowing that the certification program won't be up and running until 2012. Providers who don't demonstrate meaningful use by 2015 could face penalties. According to Blumenthal, The Office of the National Coordinator has in place a temporary certification program, but it doesn't include all the criteria that providers will have to meet in the long run.The certification standards are entirely new because they must reflect the requirements of meaningful use, he said, adding, "We don't want to create the impression for providers that something they'r...

As the Unites States moves towards a more centralized government role in healthcare, Great Britain is beginning to move in the other direction. The new coalition government has proposed some quite radical plans for the National Health Service (NHS) by shifting control of the $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to local physicians while also promising to put more power in the hands of patients. The paper (embedded below) states: "The current architecture of the health system has developed piecemeal, involves duplication and is unwieldy. Liberating the NHS, and putting power in the hands of patients and clinicians, means we will be able to effect a radical simplification, and remove layers of management." Some of the main points in the paper include: The retention of national and regional commissioning, which will come under a new NHS Commissioning Board The recognition that research is vital in order to identify new ways of preventing, diagnosing a...

The eHealth Initiative (eHI) released a new report entitled "The State of Health Information Exchange in 2010: Connecting the Nation to Achieve Meaningful Use." The report identifies significant growth in the industry, as well as rising concerns related to new government policies, and an increased focus on patients. The report was shared with several hundred state and industry leaders during the National Forum on Health Information Exchange in Washington, DC. The eHealth Initiative has been tracking the progress of health information exchange initiatives for seven years. This year, eHI identified 234 active health information exchange initiatives across the country and 199 organizations responded to the annual survey. Several key findings emerged from the survey results: Despite recent funding, significant challenges exist to supporting provider attainment of meaningful use. The survey revealed that despite expanding capabilities, the ability of HIEs to support providers as t...

With the health information technology industry ramping up to help physicians and hospitals meet meaningful use, there is opportunity to bring open source solutions to bear. At the intersection of health care, government and open source, these three have a unique perspective on how to address the pressing needs within health care. If you have not had a chance to see the interview on Radar with Brian Behlendorf, Arien Malec and David Riley check it out at radar.oreilly.com

The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health held a Hearing on Efforts to Promote the Adoption and Meaningful Use of Health Information Technology on July 20, 2010. Text of the testimony provided at the meeting is below the videos: Testimony By David Blumenthal M.D. National Coordinator for Health Information Technology U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Testimony By Tony Trenkle Director Office of E-Health Standards and Services Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Testimony By Christine Bechtel Vice President National Partnership for Women and Families Testimony By Phyllis Teater Chief Information Officer Ohio State University Medical Center, Columbus, Ohio Testimony By Eugene Heslin M.D. Saugerties, New York Testimony By Charles W. Jarvis Vice Chair Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), Chicago, Illinois Testimony By Jonathan P. Hare Chairman Resilient Network Systems, Inc., San Francisco...

With patients across the country voicing a growing desire for greater engagement in and control over their medical care, a new study involving patients in Boston, Pennsylvania and Seattle will examine the impact of adding a new layer of openness to a traditionally one-sided element of the doctor-patient relationship—the notes that doctors record during and after patients’ visits. Funded through a $1.4 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Pioneer Portfolio—which supports innovative ideas and projects that may lead to important breakthroughs in health and health care—the 12-month OpenNotes© project will evaluate the impact on both patients and physicians of sharing, through online medical record portals, the comments and observations made by physicians after each patient encounter. Approximately 100 primary care physicians and 25,000 patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, and Harborview Medical ...

Mirth Corporation, the leader in commercial open source healthcare information technology, successfully powered the nation's first publically staged multi-organization demonstration of NHIN Direct standards and technologies. The demonstration included secure clinical information exchange between healthcare providers across three prominent California-based Health Information Exchanges. It took place on July 9th at Redwood MedNet's 4th Annual HIE Conference in Santa Rosa, CA, 50 miles north of San Francisco. Organizations participating in the landmark demonstration included the pioneering Redwood MedNet Health Information Exchange, as well as the Western Health Information Network from Long Beach, CA, and Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz. Technology partners supporting the initiative -- in addition to Mirth Corporation -- included Harris Corporation, MedPlus, creator of Care360, and Microsoft, developer of HealthVault, a personal health technology platform. "Microsoft ...

Student employees and Brigham Young University video staff created this Old-Spice-themed ad for Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library . This is really quite funny and creative... Tip of the hat to  scopeblog.stanford.edu

Watch this report on Health Information Technology to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) during their July 16, 2010 meeting: The report has been released. You can view the report and video at the PCAST Report on Health IT post. ...

We have reached a fulcrum point in the history of health care in our country. The announcement on Tuesday of the final rule establishing Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs for the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHR) creates a framework for change that will have reverberations throughout the health care industry. An important companion rule (pdf) was also released that establishes standards, specifications and certification criteria for EHRs. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information technology at Health and Human Services (HHS), and Marilyn Tavenner, principal deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), published an overview of the meaningful use rule in the the New England Journal of Medicine . John D. Halamka, of both Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, wrote an excellent analysis of the final standards rule on his blog . I expect in the coming months there will be a great de...

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced final rules to help improve Americans' health, increase safety and reduce health care costs through expanded use of electronic health records (EHR). Present: - Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary, US Dept of Health & Human Services (HHS) - Dr. Donald Berwick, Director, Center for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) - Dr. David Blumenthal, Director, ONC for Health IT - Dr Regina Benjamin, US Surgeon General - Reginal Holliday, patient advocate

Remember how you learned in BIO 101 that many fluids in the human body are normally sterile? And you know how you laugh with condescension when someone dares to question this dogma? After all, we know that the gut and the skin are full of microorganisms, but the lung? The bladder? This is inconceivable, heretical! Well, actually, this, like many other dogmas that seemed like God's word at the time, has been broken open by some very interesting research emerging from multiple laboratories around the world. I was first stopped in my tracks about a year ago, while listening to an NPR story in my car and learning that the number of bugs we carried on and in us was about 10-times greater than the number of our own cells. Then, in a farm house in Cornwall a couple of weeks ago, while on vacation, I read an article in an October 2009 issue of Eureka , The Times monthly science magazine, which once again made me ponder our sojourns in life, the bacteria that cohabitate with us. And fi...

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued a final rule defining meaningful use requirements to qualify for incentive payments under the HITECH portion of the ARRA. The final rule for meaningful use is embedded below (it is temporarily available at the Public Inspection Desk , but this link will expire after the rule is actually published) and it is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register July, 28 2010. The rule definitively outlines all the specifics of Stage 1 meaningful use and clinical quality measure reporting to receive the incentive payments in 2011 and 2012. The final rule builds on the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) released December 30, 2009. The definition of meaningful use attempts to harmonize criteria across other CMS programs as much as possible and coordinate with quality initiatives. It also is closely linked to the certification standards criteria in development by the Office of the National Coordin...