David Perara

See the following -

A Discussion of Medicaid’s $5 Billion/Year IT Infrastructure Transformation

CMS provides funding to the tune of 5 billion dollars per year to support the Medicaid information technology platforms run by the states. In December 2015, CMS issued a final rule, Mechanized Claims Processing and Information Retrieval Systems (90%  Federal/10% State), to assist states to update Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS) in over 20 states. These changes will allow states to improve customer service and support the dynamic nature of Medicaid eligibility, enrollment, and delivery systems. Also within this rule was language directing the Medicaid Enterprise towards an open, modular architecture.

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OSEHRA 2017: Microsoft, OpenStack, IBM Support VistA in the Cloud

This year’s OSEHRA 2017 Open Source Summit proved to be another major milestone in the transition from locked-in vendor-controlled health information technology to an open solutions approach. One of the major news stories at the summit was the decision by Microsoft to join OSEHRA and collaborate with the Open Health community. Another major presentation was that of Martin Rice, Director of the Division of State System for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Clyneice Chaney, Principal Systems Engineer. In their presentation (video* and PowerPoint*), Rice and Chaney described how CMS is transitioning to an open/modular approach to State Medicaid IT systems.

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OSEHRA 2017: Open Source Becomes Mainstream in the Healthcare Industry

One of the most exciting things about the OSEHRA 2017 Open Source Summit was to see so many leading edge open source health IT solutions, and to hear reports of the major strides they are making around the world. Our very own Editor-in-Chief, Roger A. Maduro gave a presentation on the state of open health IT. The room was absolutely packed, with standing room only. Maduro started his presentation by pointing out that during the recent HIMSS17 conference in Orlando, Florida, more than half of of the 300 sessions of the conference were based on open source solutions such as FHIR, Blockchain, Interoperability and the open/modular IT strategy being followed by Medicaid.

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