Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)

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Swan Song For Connectathon In Windy City

John Andrews | Healthcare IT News | November 11, 2013

Anticipation about the IHE North American Connectathon’s move to Cleveland in 2015 is running high among the event’s organizers, though they insist that they are not looking past their final year in Chicago Jan. 27-31, 2014. Read More »

Team Demonstrates Digital Health Platform for Department of Veterans Affairs

Press Release | Georgia Institute of Technology | January 31, 2017

“Liberate the data.” That was a principal design goal for a team of public-private health care technology collaborators established by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Veterans Health Administration to develop a working and scalable proof-of-concept digital health platform (DHP) to support the department’s long-term vision. The open-source project demonstrated both proven and emerging technologies for interoperability and advanced functionality innovations from both the public and private sectors...

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Test Highlights: How To Do EHR Data Sharing Right

Mary Mosquera | Healthcare IT News | September 19, 2012

The Department Veterans Affairs  and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration have demonstrated how to securely share sensitive health information via electronic health records  (EHRs). Read More »

Texas Medical Association Slams ONC Safety Plan

Dan Bowman | FierceHealthIT | February 12, 2013

The health IT safety action plan proposed by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT in December is not specific enough to succeed, according to recent comments made by the Texas Medical Association. Read More »

The 128-Byte Data Field That Could Save Lives And Billions Of Dollars

Dan Munro | Forbes | March 25, 2013

I can easily think of 5 articles that highlight the extraordinary waste and cost of the U.S. healthcare system. [...] The PwC report concluded that about $1.2 trillion was wasted – each year. Here’s how PwC further categorized that waste... Read More »

The CMS and ONC Final Rules Arrive

Steve Posnack from ONC declared today IT Bonanza Day. The Interoperability Roadmap, CMS Meaningful Use Final Rules with a Comment Period (Stage 2 and 3) as well as the ONC 2015 Certification Rule were published today...Here’s my first impression: It remains to be seen how the comment period on the EHR Incentive Programs final rule will be used to align the Meaningful Use program  with the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) effort. It would not surprise me that the CMS final rules are not really final...

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The Fax of Life

Sarah Kliff | Vox | October 30, 2017

When you walk into the Arlington Women’s Center, you see a spacious waiting room with artwork on the wall, maroon chairs, and a friendly receptionist sitting at the front desk. The obstetrics and gynecology practice serves a high-income suburb of Washington, DC. Framed photographs on the wall advertise the center’s physicians who’ve made lists of the city’s best doctors. It’s a modern, upscale doctor office. But when it needs to share patient records, it turns to an outdated technology: the fax machine...

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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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The HITECH Era – A Patient-Centered Perspective

Robert M. Wachter, Michael Blum, Aaron Neinstein, and Mark Savage | Connecting Health Data | October 10, 2017

We appreciate the recent perspectives published in the New England Journal of Medicine on the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the positive impact that it and resulting health IT policies have had on U.S. health care.1,2 The perspectives highlighted the remarkable increase in adoption and use of electronic health records (EHRs) over the past eight years, thanks to the HITECH Act and to ONC’s and CMS’s implementation of it with major advice and help from the multi-stakeholder HIT Policy and Standards committees...

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The New Health IT Arms Race Between The US And EU

Nicole Fisher and Ben Heubl | Forbes.com | March 10, 2014

If you were to ask anyone in the United States what “health access” meant to them, you would get a different answer. In the UK, for most people, it means the ability to access National Health Service (NHS) amenities.

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The Pathway to Patient Data Ownership and Better Health

Katherine A. Mikk, Harry A. Sleeper, and Eric J. Topol | JAMA | September 25, 2017

Digital health data are rapidly expanding to include patient-reported outcomes, patient-generated health data, and social determinants of health. Measurements collected in clinical settings are being supplemented by data collected in daily life, such as data derived from wearable sensors and smartphone apps, and access to other data, such as genomic data, is rapidly increasing. One projection suggests that a billion individuals will have their whole genome sequenced in the next several years. These additional sources of data, whether patient-generated, genomic, or other, are critical for a comprehensive picture of an individual’s health...

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The President’s Precision Medicine Initiative – The First Annual Check-Up

Antoinette F. Konski | JD Supra Business Advisor | January 27, 2016

Watching President Obama’s recent 2016 State of the Union Address reminded me that one year has passed since the President announced a new “precision” or personalized medicine initiative to advance personalized, effective therapies for the American public. It was during his 2015 State of the Union Address that the President stated:[1]
“[T]onight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier. We can do this.”...

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The Real Story About COTS for the VA

Deanne Clark | FCW | March 14, 2017

There has been a tremendous amount of news coverage of recent congressional hearings about the need for the Department of Veterans Affairs to replace its existing electronic health record technology. What's even more remarkable is how one-sided the discussions and the reporting have been. For anyone without a background in healthcare IT, it would seem like a slam dunk that moving to a commercial off the shelf electronic health record solution is the best way forward for the VA...

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The Secretary’s Ventures Fund Announces 2017 Projects

Press Release | U.S. Department of Health and Human Services | May 17, 2017
 
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, M.D. today announced the selection of five entrepreneurial projects for investment by the Secretary’s Ventures Fund (HHS Ventures). The projects were chosen from across HHS and are part of the latest round of funding and support designed to advance the Department’s innovation agenda... HHS Ventures is a highly competitive effort that provides growth-stage funding and support to HHS employees with proven ideas for how to dramatically improve their office, agency, or the Department’s ability to carry out its mission...

Two New Federal Reports Released That Have Major Public Health Impacts

Two new Federal reports were recently released that have a public health impact. First, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released its 2022 Report to Congress: Update on Access, Exchange, and Use of Electronic Health Information. This report covers the current state of adoption of health information technology and access to electronic health information guided largely by the requirements of the 2016 21st Century Cures Act. The report observes that, “Although tremendous progress has been made with EHRs that capture and support the use of health information about individuals, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in health IT systems that support capturing and using population data. The challenges exposed during the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic pinpointed the importance of health IT to monitor population health regarding public health surveillance of testing, diagnosis, and vaccine distribution.”

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