Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)

This week, a collaboration of private sector companies, the government, and not-for-profits hopes to deliver an EHR system to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria, project leader Luis Belen told Morning eHealth's Darius Tahir. Belen, CEO of the non-profit, D.C-based National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved, has been personally touched by the disaster: two of his aunts died because of the storm. The organization is coordinating with teams from HHS to bring a package of satellite phones, pre-loaded laptops, Amazon cloud storage, and an open-source software, OpenEMR+.

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Poorly designed, hard-to-use computerized health records are a threat to patient safety, and an independent agency should be set up to investigate injuries and deaths linked to health information technology, according to a federal study released Tuesday. Read More »

The Direct standard, which enables participants to send authenticated and encrypted health data directly to trusted recipients online, could help to accelerate health information exchange efforts, according to a pair of consumer coalitions. Read More »

Henry Wei was selected as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for the Blue Button program as part of the new White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program. The program pairs top innovators from the private sector, nonprofits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate on solutions that aim to deliver significant results in six months. Read More »

A bit slow on the uptake, perhaps, but the business model for Personal Health Records is taking off. And the venture capital seeded in 2011 – an amount ranking second only to the vast health information management category – is set to yield new products and bolster existing ones. But will they really be ready for patients?

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Everything you may know about Population Health (PH) is wrong. I wrote about the complexities associated with PH in the ACO Survival Guide (the Guide). The Guide describes the moving parts necessary to succeed using the accountable care model including data analytics, care coordination, quality metrics and, of course, a deep understanding of HHS' evolving reimbursement regulations. Certainly, any knowledgeable observer could review the Guide and conclude that the ACO model was fraught with complexity and there were plenty of opportunities for false starts and outright failures, potentially costing an organization tens of millions of dollars...

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