DirectTrust

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Halamka's Dispatch from HIMSS

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. In the next 24 months we’ll see an accelerating evolution of fee for service into alternative payment models fueled by MACRA and MIPS

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HHS Called on to Eliminate Health Information Blocking

Kate Monica | EHR Intelligence | August 31, 2017

A coalition of healthcare stakeholders convened by Health IT Now called HHS and its departments to eliminate information blocking so that providers can effectively aggregate patient EHRs and advance interoperability. The letter from organizations including the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), AMIA, DirectTrust, and athenahealth requested HHS issue a proposed rule that takes existing laws, standardization, patient health data access, and other complicating factors into consideration...

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Is EHR data blocking really as bad as ONC claims?

Diana Manos | Healthcare IT News | June 13, 2016

Consensus that EHR vendors and profit-hungry hospitals are intentionally making it hard for patients and others to access date is based on evidence – much of it put forth by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT – that is largely anecdotal. Center for Medical Interoperability vice president Kerry McDermott says data blocking is a systemic issue because information sharing is a new practice in healthcare...

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Keeping Everyone in the Know: New CMS ADT Rule

On March 9, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued the Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule aimed at enhancing interoperability and increasing patient access to health information. This Final Rule contains a new Condition of Participation (CoP) that requires all hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and Critical Access Hospitals to electronically share (via an electronic health record [EHR] or another electronic administrative system) event notifications (also referred as e-notifications) with other providers across the continuum of care. These event notifications should occur whenever patients have an emergency department (ED) or inpatient admission, discharges, or transfers (also known as ADTs) in community hospitals.

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ONC Holds A Key To The Structural Deficit

Adrian Gropper | The Health Care Blog | April 7, 2013

It’s called Blue Button+ and it works by giving physicians and patients the power to drive change. Read More »

Open Health Round-Up For 2014: Notable Articles, Reports, And Events

Even the hidebound field of health care can undergo a lot of change over the course of one year. Key health IT trends that I saw throughout 2014 are summarized in another article. Here I'll list some of the most notable articles and reports related to open source, standards, and transparency in health. Read More »

The Evolving Landscape of Health Information Exchange

The original vision for nationwide health information exchange was a “network of networks” model where local HIEs would interact HIE-to-HIE to form a virtual national network. But notice that many of the new initiatives are essentially solving a different problem: they are enabling point-to-point connections across a wider geography and set of clinical sites. This seems more like a large, single national network rather than leverage of more distributed organizations or implementations. Only time will tell if these private sector initiatives will collaborate, converge or compete. And only time will tell of the limitations of ONC’s ability to influence and provide leadership will creates gaps or provide new opportunities for innovation.

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The HITECH Era in Retrospect

John D. Halamka, M.D. and Micky Tripathi, Ph.D. | The New England Journal of Medicine | September 7, 2017

At a high level, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 accomplished something miraculous: the vast majority of U.S. hospitals and physicians are now active users of electronic health record (EHR) systems. No other sector of the U.S. economy of similar size (one sixth of the gross domestic product) and complexity (more than 5000 hospitals and more than 500,000 physicians) has undergone such rapid computerization...

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