Health Information Exchange (HIE)

See the following -

The Direct Project in Action

Fred Trotter | O'Reilly Radar | February 24, 2012

Houston's healthcare community is deploying a Direct Project pilot.

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The EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup

John D. Halamka, M.D. | Life as a CIO Blog | November 8, 2011

Today, the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup, originally formed by the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), will announce the collaborative work of seven states (California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon), eight EHR vendors (Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, e-MDs, Greenway, McKesson Physician Practice Solutions, NextGen Healthcare, Sage, and Siemens Healthcar 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 Experience of Interoperability Thus Far

As I travel across the country and listen to CIOs struggling with mandates from Meaningful Use to ICD-10 to the HIPAA Omnibus rule to the Affordable Care Act, I'm always looking for ways to reduce the burden on IT leaders. All have expressed frustration with the health information exchange (HIE) policies and technologies for care coordination. quality measurement, and patient engagement. As a country, what can we do to reduce this anxiety? Read More »

The GAO Report on Health Care Price Transparency

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn | Health Populi | November 2, 2011

This morning during my still-dark-at-5:15 am walk, my iPod was motivating me to “get up offa that thing,” as James Brown was motivating me to “release the pressure.” Two minutes into the song, he urges, “Get into the sunshine, church is out.” Read More »

The Golden Age Of Health Informatics?

Mark Braunstein | InformationWeek Healthcare | November 19, 2013

So much attention is paid to the problems in the trenches that it is easy to forget just how far we've come in the past few years. It was only 2008 when the oft-cited DesRoches NEJM survey showed that 4 percent of physicians had a clinically active electronic medical records system (my term for what they called fully functional EMRs). [...] Read More »

The Golden Spike Part 2

John D. Halamka | Life As A Healthcare CIO | October 16, 2012

Today we made history in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.   At 11:35am Governor Deval and his physician sent the Governor's healthcare record from Massachusetts General Hospital to Baystate Medical Center. It arrived and was integrated into Baystate's Cerner medical record. Read More »

The Importance of a Nursing Data Framework for Clinical Data Exchange

With more than 4 million nurses in the U.S., nurses are the largest clinical segment of the U.S. healthcare sector. Nurses have indisputably demonstrated an ability to improve healthcare outcomes. We are just beginning to utilize data from healthcare information technologies and to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve patient outcomes. One of the key benefits of AI will be the ability to leverage the data from nursing care plans and nursing diagnoses to perform work load balancing for nursing staff. This is a key solution to future management of the problem of the shortage of nurses.

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The IT Haves And Have-Nots Of Healthcare Providers

Anthony Brino | Medical Practice Insider | November 4, 2014

A rift is cracking open between smaller health systems, the proverbial “have nots,” and large highly-capitalized hospital systems.  For those have nots, financial sustainability continues to be a struggle as IT costs pull more resources from other priorities, including investments in financial software, emerging patient care technologies and capital improvements, according to a new report from Black Book...

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The ITDotHealth Conference

John Halamka | Life As A Healthcare CIO | September 11, 2012

Today, I participated in the ITDotHealth Conference in Boston, discussing one simple question with a selection of the nation's EHR and PHR experts : How we can best innovate/change our EHRs while also operating them to transact daily patient care? Read More »

The Meaningful Use Stage 2 Finish Line

Hospitals across the country have until September 30 to complete their 2014 reporting period for Meaningful Use Stage 2. Recently Ashish Jha and Julia Adler-Milstein published important articles in Health Affairs about the current state of EHRs  and Health Information Exchange .  What can we learn about the status of Meaningful Use Stage 2 across the country? Read More »

The Number Of Health Information Exchange Efforts Is Declining, Leaving The Viability Of Broad Clinical Data Exchange Uncertain

Julia Adler-Milstein, Sunny C. Lin and Ashish K. Jha | Health Affairs | July 1, 2016

The diffusion of health information exchange (HIE), in which clinical data are electronically linked to patients in many different care settings, is a top priority for policy makers. To drive HIE, community and state efforts were federally funded to broadly engage providers in exchanging data in ways that improved patient care...

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The ONC 10 Year Vision

On June 5th 2014, ONC released  “Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: a 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure." The plan is divided in 3 year goals, 6 year goals, and 10 year goals. Five specific tactics support the strategies. Below is a summary of the report and a few comments from my Massachusetts experience that support the reasonableness of the ONC goals.

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The Promise of a Little Blue Button

John Moore | Chilmark Research | September 11, 2012

...despite some shortcomings, the event was focused around what may be the government’s (VA & CMS) finest contributions to promoting patient engagement – the Blue Button.
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The Promise of Electronic Health Records

John Halamka | Government Health IT | December 5, 2011

Last week, Don Berwick completed his 17 month tenure as administrator of Medicare and Medicaid. The nation should be grateful that such a visionary was at the helm. The nation should be frustrated that he was never confirmed. Read More »