Andy Slavitt
See the following -
EHRs Can’t Keep Up with Healthcare Analytics Abilities, Needs
The electronic health record simply isn’t evolving quickly enough to keep up with rapid innovations in healthcare big data analytics and the increasingly complex needs of end-users, says an editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) this week. The opinion piece, authored by a trio of physicians and researchers from Stanford University, points out that existing clinical decision support features often border on the useless due to an overwhelming number of low-priority alarms and alerts, inadequate data visualizations, and an inability to capture socioeconomic and behavioral data within the clinical workflow...
- Login to post comments
Are CMS' Efforts Too Little and Too Late to Save the Collapsing US Rural Healthcare System?
With 35 percent of rural hospitals losing money and almost two-thirds running a negative operating margin, there’s simply no way rural facilities can invest in health IT without help...It’s clear that CMS understands we can’t leave rural hospitals to fend for themselves. But it also seems clear that a lot of hospitals invested in electronic health records (EHRs) they could ill afford to qualify for Meaningful Use funds—dollars that seldom covered implementation costs for solutions that didn’t yield significant cost savings and required additional technical personnel...“The high capital and operating costs associated with health IT, specifically EHRs, have put some hospitals in a difficult position,” wrote Becker’s Hospital CFO in a prescient January 2014 article. “Do they absorb the financial hit now, even if they know they can't afford it? Most organizations are doing so …”
- Login to post comments
AVIA Names Andy Slavitt as Senior Advisor
AVIA, the nation's leading network for health systems seeking to innovate and transform, announced that Andy Slavitt will join as a Senior Advisor. Slavitt brings to AVIA over two decades of private and public sector leadership in healthcare and technology. Slavitt previously served as the Acting Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Obama. There, he oversaw the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplace...
- Login to post comments
Breaking Down the Role of Patient Engagement in Meaningful Use
Patient engagement plays a great role in meaningful use, despite much industry debate and conflicting interests. Patient engagement is not just a new patient-centered care philosophy. For providers and hospitals participating in the EHR Incentive Programs, patient engagement is a critical part of receiving incentive payments. Between the different stages of meaningful use and new rule proposals amending the program, the requirements for patient engagement are not always clear.
- Login to post comments
CMS Launches Chief Data Officer Position
Earlier this month, we reported how healthcare is increasingly embracing a new C-suite position: chief data officer. Now, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is getting in on the act, with the appointment of its first CDO, Niall Brennan...
- Login to post comments
HealthCare.gov Official: Expect Glitches In November
There will be hiccups, but the federal online marketplace for health insurance plans is in a far better position to handle the open enrollment period that begins Nov. 15, a top official said Thursday...
- Login to post comments
HHS Creates New HealthCare.Gov CEO, CTO Jobs
The federal government is girding for a second wave of Healthcare.gov enrollees this fall with new positions that bring a fresh injection of technology and management expertise...
- Login to post comments
HHS CTO Susannah Fox on Health Datapalooza
Every spring, our team in the HHS IDEA Lab gears up for our biggest event of the year: the Health Datapalooza. It’s an annual celebration of the power of data that was started by my predecessor, Todd Park, in 2010. This year, we were honored to hear from an extraordinary lineup of leaders from private industry, academia and the federal government, including Vice President Biden. I thought I’d share excerpts from three of my colleagues’ speeches, to give people a sense of the scope and depth of the discussions.
- Login to post comments
How Does FHIR Fit into Recent Interoperability Initiatives?
Over the past few months, APIs have been the talk of the healthcare industry, pushing HL7's FHIR into the spotlight for interoperability. Plenty of talk supports the position that application programming interfaces (APIs) will enhance health data interoperability, particularly a leading API standard known as FHIR. Health Level 7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) is a data standard that helps different health applications work on the different interfaces that exist in the industry (such as an Epic Systems or a Cerner interface)...
- Login to post comments
New HHS Secretary Reshuffles Obamacare Management
In preparation for this fall’s Affordable Care Act enrollment period, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell on Friday announced a new management structure drawing on recommendations following last year’s messy rollout of Healthcare.gov...
- Login to post comments
Not So Fast: CMS Says Meaningful Use Not Dead, New Incentive Program Will Take Time
One week after Andy Slavitt said meaningful use would be replaced soon, the acting Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and national coordinator Karen DeSalvo made it clear that the changes would take time and that providers must still follow the current program. Slavitt and DeSalvo in a blog post Tuesday afternoon explained the new regulatory framework would move away from measuring clicks to focusing on care...
- Login to post comments
Obamacare Website Has Cost $840 Million
The Obama administration has spent roughly $840 million on HealthCare.gov, including more than $150 million just in cost overruns for the version that failed so badly when it launched last year...
- Login to post comments
ONC Playbook Breaks Down Health IT, EHR Tasks and Buzzwords
The healthcare industry seems to be largely driven by buzzwords: quick and snappy phrases that reduce complex, difficult, expensive and often confusing initiatives into keywords that may not mean much to the uninitiated. From big data and population health management to electronic health records and value-based care, these short and sweet terms have come to define the new direction of one of the nation’s largest sectors...
- Login to post comments