CMS EHR Incentive Programs

See the following -

Report on the ONC 2017 Technical Interoperability Forum

Last week I attended with my colleague Mike Berry the ONC 2017 Technical Interoperability Forum. This meeting was convened under the 21st Century Cures Act passed by Congress in late 2016. Several hundred participants attended a series of panel presentations and discussions. The forum took place over one-and-a-half-days. The forum covered a variety of topics related to interoperability, including discussion of the business case for interoperability, semantics, national networks, and application programming interfaces (APIs). In many ways the speakers were “the usual suspects” involved in national networks, standards development, and HIE planning and implementation.

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Skilled Nursing Facilities Lag Acute Care Settings in EHR, HIE Use

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | September 11, 2017

The first nationally representative survey on electronic health record adoption and health information exchange among skilled nursing facilities has found that they are lagging behind acute care settings. While data released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT shows that most SNFs (64 percent) used EHRs to manage patient health information last year and a fifth of facilities (18 percent) used both an EHR and a state or regional health information organization (HIO), a HIT gap persists with their acute care counterparts...

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Successful Public Health IT Project Collaboration

Most public health information technology projects rely on strong collaboration to be successful, especially across vendor-client boundaries. Here are some successful strategies: Clear vision. A concise and clear vision focused on public health outcomes is embraced and articulated by all participants in the project; Strong support and leadership from senior management. Without strong support from senior management, projects are rarely given the priority to enable success. This prioritization includes both agency and vendor commitment.

The Reduction of State-coordinated HIE: How Should Public Health React?

Noam ArztA recent article in HealthAffairs describes a significant decline in the number of both operational HIEs and HIEs in the planning stage from several years earlier. The authors note continuing barriers to broad-based HIE and a shift to vendor-driven exchange which diminishes the effectiveness of community-based networks. In effect, this translates to a shift away from geographic-based/dominated HIEs to product-dominated HIEs. We have already noted (see The Interoperability of Things) the lack of a national strategy on HIE, and ONC’s Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap barely mentions the concept.