Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)

See the following -

Consumer Health IT Summit - Government As Catalyst

Brian Ahier | Government Health IT | September 13, 2012

Kicking off National Health IT Week the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in conjunction with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) hosted the second Consumer Health IT Summit on Monday, September 10, 2012. Read More »

Cost of a Breach: Forensics and Notification

Staff Writer | Protenus | August 17, 2016

Continuing our Cost of a Breach series that examines and breaks down the cost of a hospital data breach, this week’s post will take a closer look at the first two steps a hospital or healthcare institution must take after a data breach has occurred: forensics and notification. In the aftermath of a data breach, the first thing a healthcare organization must do is determine what electronic health records (EHRs) were illegitimately accessed and who accessed them; this process is known as data forensics...

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Count Down To Health Datapalooza IV

Staff Writer | HITECH Answers | May 30, 2013

The Health Data Initiative (HDI) was launched in 2010 by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) which has now grown into the Health Data Consortium... Read More »

Data Innovation, Crowdsourcing On The Horizon For Innovation Fellows Program

Shefali Kapadia | Federal News Radio | April 3, 2014

After the first two rounds of the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program showed marked success, the White House announced applications are open for Round 3 of the program.  "We are accepting applications right now through April 7," said Jennifer Pahlka, deputy chief technology officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and one of the executives that runs the PIF program.

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Data Mining Could Contain Health Costs

Staff | CBS St. Louis | February 22, 2012

We live in an era of information overload. Now the government is releasing even more data. One expert says, in the right hands it could be a tool for change in this country’s massive health care system. Imagine you’ve just been released from the hospital. You need appointments for several specialists, meals delivered, and transportation. Now there’s an app for that, so to speak. Read More »

Department of Health and Human Services Innovations Team Is Connecting with You!

Steven Randazzo | GovLoop | September 13, 2012

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Innovation Team is taking new steps to make it easier for people to connect and find information on our innovation activities. As an example, we have used Twitter to promote the first time public voting for selecting input on the HHSinnovates Program. Read More »

Did Politics Help Cause HealthCare.gov Failures?

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | October 17, 2013

There was the government shutdown, which drew to a close late Wednesday and was largely seen as a case of partisan politics hijacking the work of nonpartisan career employees. Then there was the troubled launch of the online health insurance marketplace, HealthCare.gov, which was largely seen as a failure of bureaucracy. Read More »

Direct Lab Transaction Guide Offered

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee | GovInfoSecurity.com | July 16, 2012

Federal officials have issued guidance on how to exchange lab test results using the Direct Project secure messaging protocol. Read More »

Distributed Ledgers, the Next step in Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) Including Environmental Data

Jeff Brandt | LinkedIn Pulse | December 15, 2016

Soon we will be able to access thousands of datapoint into our lives, many will reflect our environment and health. The HHS Idea Labs held a Entrepreneur-in-Residence webinar on December 13, 2016, for recruiting an software architect to assist the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in collecting employment data as it pertains to a persons health. They wish to share/store the collected data in the EHR. Onerous at best, because most EHR today do not have API for uploading data and HL7 standards do not currently provide for discreet PGHD data...

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Do We Need More or Less Healthcare IT Regulation and Legislation?

Just as I clarified last week in my post about Certification, the answer to the question “do we need more or less healthcare IT regulation and legislation” is that we need the right amount of the right regulations/legislation. Sometimes when clinicians prescribe medication, although it does therapeutic good, it creates side effects which need to be addressed by changing a dose or by adding additional medications. Such is the case with HITECH. It was generally good medicine, but now that we’ve seen the side effects on workflow, clinician burden, and efficiency, there needs to be a dose adjustment...

Do We Really Need More Doctors? How About Trying to Have Healthier Folks?

Health care needs a better business model. HHS reports that U.S. health care spending will surpass $10,000 per person this year, will grow almost 6% annually for the foreseeable future, and will consume over 20% of GDP by 2025.  About half of our spending goes for labor costs, with health care employment remaining one of the "bright spots" in our economy.  Indeed, health care jobs continued to soar even when the economy tanked in our most recent recession. Despite that steady growth, we continue to talk about a physician shortage, especially for primary care.  Medical school enrollment is at new highs, yet it is not projected to dent the demand...

DocGraph Joins Claudia Williams, Niall Brennan and Jessica Kahn in DC to Promote Transparency and Fairness in the Healthcare System

Press Release | DocGraph , Careset Systems | September 28, 2016

Health data scientist Fred Trotter presented today at the White House Open Data Innovation Summit around national health data transparency. Trotter is the founder of DocGraph which released the US government’s first national Provider referral pattern data in 2012 that enabled researchers, journalists, and companies around the nation to provide data-backed healthcare solutions...

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Docs Working with Regional Extension Centers Attest to MU Obstacles

Marla Durben Hirsch | FierceEMR | February 15, 2012

Nearly three-fourths (74 percent) of physicians working with regional extension centers (RECs) to attest to the Meaningful Use of their electronic health records have encountered problems in doing so, according to the RECs that have reported the issue to U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). Read More »

Doctor Data Made To Order

Fred Trotter | O'Reilly Strata | August 10, 2013

Recently, Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a request for public comment on how they should handle the reversal of an injunction that prevented them from revealing specific information about how doctors perform. Read More »

Doctors Say Data Fees Are Blocking Health Reform

Arthur Allen | Politico | February 23, 2015

As they move to exchange patient information with hospitals and other health care partners, doctors are suffering sticker shock: The vendors of the health care software want thousands of dollars to unlock the data so they can be shared. It may take an act of Congress to provide relief...The exorbitant prices to transmit and receive data, providers and IT specialists say, can amount to billions a year. And the electronic health record industry is increasingly reliant on this revenue...

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