Health and Human Services (HHS)

See the following -

Are Electronic Medical Records Worth the Costs of Implementation?

Tara O'Neill | American Action Forum | August 6, 2015

All of these potential advances could greatly improve health outcomes and help bend the health care cost curve. Unfortunately, these advances come with significant costs, both financially and in terms of personal privacy. Going forward, policymakers should work to ensure limited resources are used in a more cost-effective manner. Changes to EMR policy have been part of recent legislative and executive action.

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Axial Exchange And HealthDay Partner To Provide Customized Health News To Enhance Patient Engagement And Improve Outcomes

Press Release | Axial Exchange, HealthDay | April 8, 2014

Axial Exchange, Inc., a pioneer in using mobile apps to deepen the patient’s role in improving outcomes, today announced that it has partnered with HealthDay, a leading producer and syndicator of evidence-based healthcare news for consumers and physicians, to give Axial’s users access to HealthDay’s news updates. Axial’s customers will be able to view information on iPhone and Android devices that has been tailored to align with their specific health conditions, such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

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CDC Issues RFI for Real-world Testing of Health Information Technology

In October the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Request for Information (RFI) for a Natural Test Collaborative (NTC). Through a series of questions, the RFI seeks opinions and information about "The development of a national testbed (notionally called the National Test Collaborative (NTC)) for real-world testing of health information technology (IT)" and "Approaches for creating a sustainable infrastructure" to achieve it. The scope of the questions is somewhat confusing and quite broad, starting with Clinical Decision Support (CDS) and electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) but quickly expanding to Electronic Health Records (EHR) and interoperability (not precisely defined).

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Electronic Health Records - Expensive, Disruptive And Here To Stay

Nicole Fisher | Forbes.com | March 18, 2014

Physicians have more to do these days and it has nothing to do with treating patients. Although staff shortages and increasing need for care are time consuming for providers and add responsibilities, the real culprit of lost work time, especially for Emergency Room physicians, is electronic health records (EHR). 

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Feds Move Into Digital Medicine, Face Doctor Backlash

Laura Ungar and Jayne O'Donnell | USA TODAY | February 1, 2015

"Physicians passionately despise their electronic health records," says Lexington, Ky., emergency physician Steven Stack, the American Medical Association's president-elect. "We use technology quickly when it works … Electronic health records don't work right now."

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Feds Release FDASIA Workgroup Report On Health IT Governance

Diana Manos | Government HealthIT | April 3, 2014

A widely anticipated report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other agencies may finally clear the air on how healthcare IT – and mHealth in particular – will be regulated.  

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HHS Publishes FDASIA Health IT Report

Brian Ahier | Advanced Health Information Exchange Resources | April 3, 2014

HHS released a draft report that includes a proposed strategy and recommendations for a health information technology (health IT) framework, which promotes product innovation while maintaining appropriate patient protections and avoiding regulatory duplication. The congressionally mandated report was developed in consultation with health IT experts and consumer representatives and proposes to clarify oversight of health IT products based on a product’s function and the potential risk to patients who use it.

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ICD-10: This Just Isn't How The Deal Should Go Down

Tom Sullivan | Government HealthIT | March 28, 2014

ICD-10 has been the butt of countless jokes during the last several months but none so surprising as the latest one-liner. Only this isn’t funny.

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Lack Of Funding, Clout Didn't Deter Kolodner From Tackling ONC's Top Spot

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | April 10, 2014

Dr. Robert Kolodner had his eyes wide open when he took the top spot at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS.  He knew that his predecessor, Dr. David Brailer, had asked in vain for billions of dollars to help subsidize the cost of EHRS to hospitals and physicians, federal money he thought ONC needed.

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New US Digital Service Looks to Avoid IT Catastrophes

Alex Howard | TechPresident | August 13, 2014

The second initiative went live on Monday, when the White House formally launched a United States Digital Service (USDS) and published an open source Digital Services Playbook and a “TechFAR,” a part of the guide that “highlights the flexibilities in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) that can help agencies implement ‘plays’ from the Digital Services Playbook.” Read More »

ONC calls out information blockers

Mike Miliard | Healthcare IT News | April 10, 2015

Having received many complaints in recent months about vendors and providers engaging in information blocking, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is "becoming increasingly concerned about these practices, which devalue taxpayer investments in health IT and are fundamentally incompatible with efforts to transform the nation’s health system."

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ONC fail: EHR 'data blocking' still rampant

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | April 17, 2015

Manuel Prado, president of Viva Transcription, Santa Cruz, Calif., publicly complained two years ago about the high interface fees – up to $10,000 – that electronic health record vendors charged for each hospital or physician practice they connect to his transcription service. “That's data blocking,” he charged. “If taxpayers are contributing $44,000 or $63,000 (in federal Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments) for each EHR, it's not too much to ask” that they make interconnect charges free.

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ONC Gets It Mostly Right with TEFCA 2.0

On April 17, 2019 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released the second draft of its Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) for comment. The initial version was released more than a year ago in January 2018 (see my original blog). As before, this is in response to a requirement imposed by Congress in the 21 Century Cures Act. After a somewhat lengthy (but well written) introduction, the document contains three parts (compared to just two parts the first time around)...

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Only Trump Can Go To Single-Payer

Today, I want to submit to you that only Trump can make single-payer health care happen in this country. Only a billionaire, surrounded by a cabinet of billionaires, representing a party partial to billionaires, can make that hazardous 180 degrees political turn and better the lives of the American people, and perhaps the entire world as a result. Oh, I know it’s too soon to make this observation, but note that both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Begin were deeply resented (to put it mildly) in their times, by the same type of people who find Mr. Trump distasteful today.

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Precision Medicine Initiative Needs Help with Data Sharing Barriers

Greg Slabodkin | HealthData Management | August 25, 2015

The White House is looking for input from the healthcare industry to identify new information technology activities that can help make President Obama’s $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative a reality.

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