Policy and Legislation

See the following -

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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13 Things That Are About To Change At VA

Jonathan Lutton, Troy K. Schneider | FCW | July 31, 2014

The Veterans' Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act passed the House on July 30 with a vote of 420 to 5.  The Senate followed suit, 91 to 3, on July 31, and the president's signature is all but assured...

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5 Telehealth Bills To Watch

Brian Heaton | Government Technology | May 20, 2014

Federal and state legislation on the use of telehealth has been a hot topic for lawmakers over the past year.

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Aaron Swartz's Work, Computer Crime Law, And "The Internet's Own Boy"

April Glaser | Electronic Frontier Foundation | August 27, 2014

It’s been more than a year since Aaron Swartz’s tragic death, and now Aaron’s life is the subject of a new documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy, directed by Brian Knappenberger. The documentary has received much acclaim and deservedly so...

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Are We Getting Enough Bang For Our Healthcare Buck? Hardly.

Philip Caper | Physicians For A National Health Program | July 17, 2014

The U.S. healthcare system costs each of us about twice as much as those in other wealthy countries. Are we getting our money’s worth? Not by a long shot...

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As Funding Dries Up, ONC Reorganizes, Consolidates Offices

Dan Bowman | Fierce Health IT | May 30, 2014

National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, in an internal memo sent to ONC staffers and emailed to FierceHealthIT late Friday, announced a slew of organizational changes at the agency. The changes also are set to appear in the Federal Register on June 3...

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Behavioral Health's EHR Conundrum

Tom Sullivan | Healthcare IT News | March 12, 2014

March 12, 2014-Behavioral health and long-term post-acute care are perhaps the two most significant areas left out of the meaningful use program. “When we look at the big circle of care, there’s a huge hole -- behavioral health,” said Mark Caron, CIO of Capital Blue. “Behavioral health is a mess.” And at least similar words could be used to describe the status of EHR implementation in many long-term and post-acute care settings.

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Brad Thompson: CDS Legislation Could Create Confusion

Dan Bowman | FierceHealthIT | July 18, 2014

On Thursday, lawmakers with the House Energy & Commerce Committee and health IT stakeholders convened on the Hill to once again discuss the role of health information technology in improving patient care...

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Brokers Use ‘Billions’ Of Data Points To Profile Americans

Craig Timberg, | The Washington Post | May 27, 2014

...information and much, much more is being quietly collected, analyzed and distributed by the nation’s burgeoning data-broker industry, which uses billions of individual data points to produce detailed portraits of virtually every American consumer, the Federal Trade Commission reported Tuesday...

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Burwell Confirmed As HHS Secretary

Tom Sullivan, | Healthcare IT News | June 6, 2014

The U.S. Senate voted in Sylvia Matthews Burwell as the new Secretary of Health and Human Services on Thursday afternoon.  Burwell, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget, was confirmed 78-17. Before and after the vote, Burwell both faced her share of fire and garnered high praise...

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Commentary: A 4-step Approach To Interoperability

Ashish Shah | Government Health IT | May 21, 2014

...While Meaningful Use is an important step for enabling greater adoption of EHRs, it doesn’t provide specifics around the functional use of this data across multiple platforms to improve care. That’s why total system interoperability and data liquidity must be our industry’s ultimate goals...

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Dataset Tracks World’s Open Government Data

Joshua New | Center for Data Innovation | December 11, 2014

The Global Open Data Index, a crowdsourced project launched by the Open Knowledge Foundation, released its 2014 dataset ranking 97 world governments on the openness of their data across 10 categories...

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Deaths By Medical Mistakes Hit Records

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | July 18, 2014

It's a chilling reality – one often overlooked in annual mortality statistics: Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the U.S. – third only to heart disease and cancer – claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year...

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EHR Certification Criteria Under Fire

Diana Manos | Healthcare IT News | May 2, 2014

Complaints rolling in to the ONC-The hits keep on coming as two industry groups spoke out against voluntary 2015 EHR certification under meaningful use...

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EHRA: Data Should Follow The Patient

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | August 13, 2014

The HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association told U.S. senators that, in general, a patient's healthcare data should follow the patient, and it also called for a nationwide patient data matching strategy...

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