Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC)

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Federal Advisers Share Comments, Concerns About Draft Interoperability Road Map

Dan Bowman | Fierce Health IT | October 15, 2014

In presenting an updated version of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's draft interoperability road map to a joint meeting of the federal Health IT Policy and Standards Committees on Wednesday, Erica Galvez, ONC's interoperability and exchange portfolio manager, made clear that many efforts going forward will be about balance and tradeoffs...

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Feds Tout Blue Button, Push Patient Engagement

Joseph Conn | ModernHealthcare.com | September 10, 2012

Pushing the Blue Button was what a parade of government and private-sector health information technology leaders did—often and with gusto—during a series of panel discussions in Washington to kick off Health IT Week. Read More »

FHIR And The Future Of Interoperability

Brian Ahier | Government Health IT | January 6, 2015

There is growing interest in the health care information technology community in an emerging data exchange technology known as FHIR (pronounced “fire”)...

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Flagship Project on Precision Medicine for Underserved Women Will Advance Learning Health System

Press Release | Open Source Health, Inc., Learning Health Community | March 1, 2016

Marc Wine, a supporter of the LHS - Precision Medicine PCOS Project and participant in Learning Health Community initiatives, who attended the summit hosted by the president said, "One goal is to seek collaboration with underserved communities in genomics, open data and integrative medicine. This will result in engaging individual patients in ways that will move them from dependency on fragmented healthcare to the point where patients can use their own evidence-based genetic information to make the very best health decisions." The Precision Medicine PCOS Project is aimed at developing a protocol for women with PCOS while employing an integrative medicine approach to treatment based on the participant's molecular makeup, clinical data and available scientific knowledge.

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For RECs 'The Good Stuff' Is Still Ahead

Frank Irving | Medical Practice Insider | March 20, 2014

In every region of the country, physicians and office managers turn to their Regional Extension Center for help in navigating the EHR adoption process. They've done so in large numbers — with 45 percent of U.S. primary care providers having accessed REC programs and services.

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Fridsma: Meaningful Use Causing 'Real Fatigue'

Mike Miliard | Government Health IT | December 5, 2014

"Interoperability is hard in the concrete,” Doug Fridsma, MD said, “it is impossible in the abstract.”  Fridsma, former chief scientist at ONC and now CEO of AMIA, said on Wednesday at RSNA's 100th annual meeting in Chicago that the key is enabling the free flow of information of all types — from lab results to medications to imaging data — within and between healthcare organizations of all shapes and sizes...

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Group of Electronic Health Record Vendors To Become Officially Interoperable

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes.com | June 10, 2014

A group of electronic health record vendors that announced to much fanfare plans to facilitate the exchange of patient data more than a year ago, will start rolling out that facility to their customers this summer...CommonWell Health Alliance members, which include Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, athenahealth and Greenway, have embedded within their software code that allows health care providers to find and share a patient’s medical information, wherever it might be...

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Hazards Tied to Medical Records Rush

Christopher Rowland | Boston Globe | July 20, 2014

Subsidies given for computerizing, but no reporting required when errors cause harm

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Health Care Data as a Public Utility: How Do We Get There?

Mohit Kaushal and Margaret Darling | Brookings | May 18, 2016

Despite the technological integration seen in banking and other industries, health care data has remained scattered and inaccessible. EHRs remain fragmented among 861 distinct ambulatory vendors and 277 inpatient vendors as of 2013.Similarly, insurance claims are stored in the databases of insurers, and information about public health is often kept in databases belonging to various governmental agencies. These silos wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except for the lack of interoperability that has long plagued the health care industry. For this reason, many are reconsidering if health care data is a public good, provided to all members of the public without profit...

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Health Information Exchanges vendors prove tech fitness but only a fraction of initiatives will cross siloes to achieve real interoperability by 2017, reveals Black Book

Press Release | Black Book | February 17, 2015

Health Information Exchanges vendors prove tech fitness but only a fraction of initiatives will cross siloes to achieve real interoperability by 2017, reveals Black Book In 2004, President George W. Bush decreed that within ten years, the US would achieve an environment of shared, private and authorized electronic health records, but as the ten year mark came and passed, Black Book’s latest HIE stakeholder survey discovered such a secure, robust exchange of US patient records is undeniably at least another ten years out. New federal grants aim to resuscitate failing state and regional public HIEs, but a growing number of IT vendors are drastically cutting further interoperability research and development funding. Read More »

Health IT 2014: Interoperability, Ebola And Healthcare.gov 2.0

Billy Mitchell | FedScoop | December 18, 2014

Health IT in 2014 continued its path toward a system of interoperable and open data to improve patient care with IT systems...

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Health IT Task Force Synthesizes Open API Themes

Frank Irving | HealthIT Interoperability | February 11, 2016

Health IT integration will reach a significant threshold when, as specified under 2015 Edition criteria, electronic health records systems and related tools must provide consumer-facing access to the Common Clinical Data Set via an application programming interface (API). Hard at work deciphering how consumers could leverage API technology to access patient data is the Joint API Privacy and Security Task Force...

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HHS Proposes Path To Improve Health Technology And Transform Care

Press Release | U.S. Department of Health and Human Services | January 30, 2015

ONC issues draft nationwide health IT Interoperability Roadmap; Implementation resources also released as first deliverable...

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HIMSS19: Open Source Software for Disaster Preparedness and Response

Although not officially listed as a track at the HIMSS19 conference, there are a series of very important presentations on the use of open source software for disaster preparedness and response. This is a critical topic that we have covered extensively in Open Health News. As we detailed in this article, there was a major failure in being able to provide victims of Hurricane Harvey, as well as Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria with access to their medical records. Few emergency medical responders could access their records either. The two success stories that came out of the hurricanes were two open source electronic health record (EHR) systems, OpenEMR and the VA's open source VistA EHR.

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HIT System to Help Clinics Serve Medically Underserved Populations

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | August 17, 2017

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed an IT system to improve the health and well-being of medically underserved populations through personalized interventions. Called imHealthy, the system—which includes a mobile app, open source EHR and web portal—was specifically designed by a multidisciplinary research team for the FOCUS Pittsburgh Free Health Center. However, researchers are hoping the solution will serve as a model for free clinics in other major cities across the country. According to Leming Zhou, assistant professor in the Department of Health Information Management at the University of Pittsburgh, he and his colleagues intended imHealthy to be a user-friendly, scalable, easy-to-use system to help clinics provide a comprehensive well-being assessment for those living in medically underserved communities.

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