By bmonegain Created 07/30/2010 The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will begin to make meaningful use incentive payments to eligible physicians and hospitals as early cialis online as May 2011, according to a senior CMS official, who detailed steps the agency is taking to start up the incentive program. CMS will open registration for [...]

Is your EHR ARRA Certified? Is it CCHIT Certified? For over a year the question of EHR Certification has been a mystery. Many physicians have been on “hold” as they await to find out what it means to be a certified EHR software system. The que buy cheap generic cialis online stion of Certification of [...]

Providers and patients must be confident that the electronic health information technology (health IT) products and systems they use are secure, can maintain data confidentially, can work with other systems to share information, and can p viagra order erform a set of well-defined functions. To this end, standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria for health [...]

Nation’s health IT coordinator discusses what’s at stake for doctors, the potential for consolidation in healthcare market, and what the government is doing to secure e-health records.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology issued its final rule for the temporary certification program. The program establishes a way for organizations to be authorized by the National Coordinator to test an generic viagra soft d certify electronic health record (EHR) technology. Use of certified EHR technology is a core requirement [...]

Health Information Exchange or HIE is the movement of health care information electronically across organizations within a region or community. HIE provides the capability to electronically move clinical information between disparate health care information systems while maintaining the integrity of the information being exchanged. The goal of HIE is to facilitate access to and retrieval [...]

A Message from Dr. David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology May 5, 2010 Healthcare professionals appreciate opportunities to learn from innovative colleagues and communities – to see what really works, to get “boots-on-the-ground” perspectives, to learn best practices, and to use the experience of other leaders to inform how to improve performance more [...]

Within the past month four renowned institutions — Mayo Clinic of Medicine, Harvard University, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — were awarded research grants totaling $60 million through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program. The SHARP Program funds research focused on achieving breakthrough [...]

The ultimate objective of every HITECH initiative is to create a National Health Information Network. With close to 1,000 EHR vendors, and no standards, how will we accomplish this mission? The State Health Information Exchange project is an initiative managed by the ONC (Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology). The main objective is [...]

Contributed by Patty Enrado Critics of the federal stimulus grants for EHR adoption say the federal government is throwing money at health IT and won't be getting anything in return for it.  Whether you believe money should be going into an EHR adoption initiative, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is making [...]

The firm that has won a $26 million public relations contract from the Department of Health and Human Services for a campaign on healthcare information technology, and related privacy and security issues, stirred up controversy with some of its previous government PR efforts. New York-based Ketchum Inc., winner of the new contract, received its share [...]

In the April issue of Health Affairs, David Brailer, MD, former head of ONC, conductedan informative Q&A with current ONC chief, David Blumenthal, MD. It was a nice blending of the beginning of ONC and its vision, and the build out of that vision. Brailer, who has walked the walk of Blumenthal, asked insightful questions.

So, Brian Ahler at healthsystemcio.com reports having a brief chat with Dr. David Blumenthal last week that covered:

* Transparency at the ONC
* HITREC and communities of shared learning
* Personal Health Records and possible certification
* Rural practices and Critical Access Hospitals