We reported recently on a memo issued by President Barack Obama last week to all federal agency and department heads requiring them to come up with at least two mobile device applications using government data.
Stories about the memo, widening the use of the Veteran's Affairs Department Blue Button patient download technology, and a new national mobile technology strategy appear here and, with some industry IT mavens' reactions, here.
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A decade ago, a not-for-profit organization called WorldVistA was launched with two missions.
One was to promote the use of the Veterans Affairs Department's public-domain VistA electronic health-record system outside the VA, both in the U.S. and abroad.
The other was to preserve the life's labors of thousands of government workers who created the excellent VistA system over the previous three decades.
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Tom Munnecke, like other veteran programmers who have worked with the VistA electronic health-record system developed by the Veterans Affairs Department, has seen this movie before.
The plot of previous versions always centered on forces within and outside the VA who were trying to kill off VistA and replace it with something giant corporations with government contracting vehicles could use to bill taxpayers billions of dollars to produce.
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Here's my take on the Defense Department's latest update on the proposed joint Pentagon/Veterans Affairs Department Electronic Health Record development project:
The goal of the project is to create a new electronic health-record system for use by the Military Health System and the Veterans Health Administration. Together, they operate about 110 hospitals and 1,100 clinics.
The 55-page report, "Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture to Guide the Transition of the DoD Electronic Health Record, and Related Matters," quickly turns into alphabet soup. By page 5, readers are already wading through paragraphs of brain-numbers: "The DoD/VA functional community leads the requirements development process through the FCPG, under the guidance of the ICIB. The FCPG identifies and defines proposed joint functional capabilities, then orients baseline architectural artifacts with the logical construct of the ECCF. A C-IPT—guided by the ECCF—re-engineers joint functional processes and supplements the descriptive content of architectural artifacts, as needed."
Two dangers loom for our boat of national affairs from this almost impenetrable fog.
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I've written before about the federally supported health information technology regional extension center program established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to help providers adopt and meaningfully use electronic health records systems.
Regular readers already know I'm an unabashed REC fan.
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Journalists love a spirited debate, often for selfish reasons. No matter who loses in the verbal joust, we win with a good story. On Monday, the American Hospital Association filed its public comments with the CMS to its proposed Stage 2 meaningful-use rules.
Yesterday, Christine Bechtel struck the AHA with a blog blast. Bechtel's post on the website of the National Partnership for Women & Families, charged the AHA with having "little interest in advancing meaningful-use criteria that would result in tangible benefits for patients."
Bechtel is a vice president of the partnership and an active outside adviser in federal health information technology policymaking. She is a member of the federally chartered Health IT Policy Committee and serves on six of its work groups, including ones focused on meaningful use and privacy. In her committee work, she is neither a rabble-rouser nor a wallflower.
Bechtel offers as an example of AHA recalcitrance its call for extending the compliance period in the Stage 2 rule to 30 days for hospitals to respond to a patient's request to "view, download and transmit" electronic copies of their medical records. HHS' proposed rule calls for access in 36 hours, she says.
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