More than 60,000 veterans hit the unemployment rolls in June, which puts the total number of unemployed veterans at more than 1 million, according to Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. Read More »

The Veterans Affairs Department will launch a developers’ competition to expand the deployment and use of its Blue Button functionality that enables patients to download their health information to all veterans who receive care from providers outside of the VA. Read More »

The eHealth Initiative's annual survey of health information exchange shows that as HIE adoption expands, initiatives are facing growing pains such as competing timelines to meet federal requirements, complex systems integration and uncertainties around accountable care organizations. Read More »

The federal government continues to implement various provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. This update summarizes key developments during the second quarter of 2011.... Read More »

President Barack Obama just announced a reversal of a long-standing policy that denied presidential condolence letters to the family members of soldiers who commit suicide. Relatives of soldiers killed in action receive letters from the president. Official silence, however, has long stigmatised those who die of self-inflicted wounds. Read More »

There are currently 386 software packages certified by an ONC approved certification body as ambulatory Complete EHRs, which means that the software should allow the user to fulfill all Meaningful Use requirements and possibly qualify the proud owner for all sorts of CMS incentives. Read More »

If information technology and entrepreneurship were sufficiently leveraged then within a decade development competitions could be as big a part of federal spending as standard procurement processes are now, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said Thursday. Read More »

Healthcare providers will have a new, less expensive way to send documents to Medicare review contractors starting in August. Instead of faxing or mailing documents requested to support claims, they will be able to transmit them online through an approved third party to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which will forward them to the appropriate review contractor. Read More »

In an e-mail to the Apache OpenOffice e-mail list, IBM’s Open Document Format (ODF) architect Rob Weir let the cat out of the bag that IBM would be putting its Symphony code and resources behind OpenOffice. Read More »

Legislation was introduced this week by four congressmen seeking to ensure that multi-campus hospitals receive their health IT incentives fairly. Rep. Michael C. Burgess, MD, (R-TX), Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) introduced the Equal Access and Parity for Multi-Campus Hospitals (HITECH) Act, HR 2500 on July 12.... Read More »