National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

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10 Steps to Achieving Interoperability

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | December 9, 2015

When nine organizations -- several of them health IT vendors -- urged Congress in a Dec. 7 letter to resist delaying Stage 3 of the Meaningful Use EHR Incentive Program, the plea came with an outline for strengthening interoperability. "What is clear to us is that current requirements and pace of the Meaningful Use program have taken away time and valuable resources from fixing our nation's interoperability problem, the organizations -- Apervita, athenahealth, Intel, National Alliance on Mental Illness, New Directions Technology Consulting, Oracle, United Spinal Association and Verizon -- wrote in their letter to Congressional leadership...

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15 Blockchain Whitepapers Awarded Winners of US Department of Health and Human Services Challenge

Luke Parker | Brave New Coin | August 30, 2016

A challenge held by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)  to encourage Blockchain use in the Health Information Technology field resulted in 15 winning whitepapers. The Department’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) first announced the “Use of Blockchain in Health IT and Health-Related Research” challenge in July...

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21st Century Cures and the Road Ahead

I’ve been writing fewer posts recently because the trajectory forward for healthcare and healthcare IT seems to be evolving very rapidly.   In just the past week, we’ve had: the American Hospital Association letter suggesting that 21,000 pages of regulations be rolled back including Meaningful Use Stage Three concepts and quality measurement in many care settings, the passage of the 21st Century Cures bill and its many IT related mandates, and the nomination of Tom Price for HHS Secretary  and Seema Verma for CMS administrator...

5 Tips For Cybersecurity Incident Response

Rick Kam | Government Health IT | February 2, 2015

Experts and politicians agree that security and privacy incidents are a given...And as the new cyber-risk handbook from the National Association of Corporate Directors puts it: “If a sophisticated attacker targets a company’s systems, they will almost certainly [be breached].”...

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A Definition of Cloud Computing (and How Healthcare Can Best Use It)

Shahid Shah | Med City News | December 25, 2011

A few years ago NIST came up with the first drafts of the seminal definitions of Cloud Computing; they ended up setting the stage for communicating complex technical concepts and helping making ’Cloud’ a household name. After 15 drafts, the 16th and final definition was published as The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing (NIST Special Publication 800-145) in September. Read More »

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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Changing The IT Culture At NIST

David Stegon | Fedscoop | March 18, 2013

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is known around the world for its groundbreaking research and innovations. Del Brockett, the agency’s chief information officer, wants the institute’s information technology services to be at that same level. Read More »

Clinovo White Papers Published In Summer 2014 Editions Of Leading Medical Device & Pharmaceutical Publications

Press Release | Clinovo | July 29, 2014

White papers by Clinovo on CDISC Standards for medical devices and cloud-based eClinical technologies have been published in the latest editions of leading pharmaceutical publications Data Basics and Med Device Online...

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Computer Viruses Are "Rampant" On Medical Devices In Hospitals

David Talbot | MIT Technology Review | October 17, 2012

A meeting of government officials reveals that medical equipment is becoming riddled with malware. Read More »

Connecting Patient Data Solving Healthcare Interoperability and the ONC Blockchain Challenge

Peter B. Nichol | CIO | August 24, 2016

Interoperability is an old concept dating back to the eighth century BC. Society has been struggling for centuries with the idea of combining individual parts or components to create a whole unit. However, interoperability with healthcare only came about in published works 23 years ago, in 1993. More recently, in 2013, HIMSS defined of healthcare interoperability as “the ability of different information technology systems and software applications to communicate, exchange data and use the information that has been exchanged”...

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EHNAC Applauds Health Care Industry Cybersecurity (HCIC) Task Force Report and Recommendations

Press Release | Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC) | June 20, 2017

The Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC), a non-profit standards development organization and accrediting body for organizations that electronically exchange healthcare data, today announced its support of the Health Care Industry Cybersecurity (HCIC) Task Force’s June 2 report to Congress titled Report on Improving Cybersecurity in the Health Care Industry and the recommendations therein. The Health Care Industry Cybersecurity (HCIC) Task Force was established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in March 2016 per the Cybersecurity Act of 2015, Section 405(c). EHNAC applauds HHS and the expert panel of subject matter experts on the HCIC Task Force who contributed to develop these recommendations to strengthen the privacy and security of U.S. healthcare data...

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EHR Certification: An Ongoing Process For ONC’s Office Of Certification

Carol Bean and Asara Clark | Health IT Buzz | April 25, 2013

Providers should be confident that when they buy and use a certified EHR, their product satisfies our requirements. That’s why we review any complaints we receive about these products and make sure they are addressed, even to the point of revoking certification when necessary. In fact, we recently revoked the certification of two such products. Read More »

EHR Vendors Focusing On Usability

Mary Mosquera | Government Health IT | February 12, 2013

Electronic health records (EHRs) have to be usable and useful by physicians and integrate with hospitals’ or practices’ other systems to benefit providers or else the money spent on them is just wasted. Read More »

Enhancing Patient Safety And Quality Of Care By Improving The Usability Of Electronic Health Record Systems: Recommendations From AMIA

Blackford Middleton, Meryl Bloomrosen, Mark A Dente, et. al. | JAMIA | January 25, 2013

In response to mounting evidence that use of electronic medical record systems may cause unintended consequences, and even patient harm, the AMIA Board of Directors convened a Task Force on Usability to examine evidence from the literature and make recommendations. This task force was composed of representatives from both academic settings and vendors of electronic health record (EHR) systems. Read More »

FDA to Advance Precision Medicine by Enabling Open Source Collaborative Informatics

FDA plays an integral role in President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative, which foresees the day when an individual’s medical care will be tailored in part based on their unique characteristics and genetic make-up. Yet while more than 80 million genetic variants have been found in the human genome, we don’t understand the role that most of these variants play in health or disease. Achieving the President’s vision requires working collaboratively to ensure the accuracy of genetic tests in detecting and interpreting genetic variants. We are working towards that goal by developing an informatics community and supporting platform we call precisionFDA.

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