Mostashari
Health information technology leaders have a lot on their plates today and more to come—implementing systems to match the federal IT incentive payment program upgrades, satisfying auditors roaming the land, meeting privacy constraints and preparing for the switch to a huge set of updated diagnostic and procedural codes.
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Mostashari
Federal health information technology policymakers plan to establish a voluntary program for the testing and certification of electronic health-record systems used by long-term care, post-acute care and behavioral health providers.
Congress, in drafting legislation creating the EHR incentive program under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that helped hospitals and office-based physicians buy tested and certified EHRs, did not include long-term care and behavioral health facilities, even though nearly a third of Medicare patients discharged from acute-care hospitals go to post-acute-care settings.
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There has been significant progress in getting health information technology systems to talk to one another, according to a new study on interoperability by HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
The study, “Hospital Electronic Health Information Exchange Grew Substantially in 2008-12,” was published in the August issue of the policy journal Health Affairs. The report was written by five ONC staffers, including the lead author, Michael Furukawa, director of the ONC's Office of Economic Analysis, Evaluate and Modeling, and contributor Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the ONC chief.
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Mostashari
CMS officials pushed back Wednesday on Republican suggestions that a pause is needed in the electronic health-record incentive program.
“A pause in the program would stall the progress that's been hard fought,” Dr. Farzad Mostashari, national coordinator for health information technology, said at a Wednesday hearing on the program by the Senate Finance Committee.
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Watch out for a French person talking about revolution.
“The patient is the revolutionary in healthcare these days,” said Dr. Bettina Experton, a French-born oncologist turned U.S. citizen and health IT entrepreneur. “That is why I think Blue Button is revolutionary.”
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