health IT (HIT)

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Medsphere Supports Renewed Call for Extension of Financial Incentives for EHR Adoption to Behavioral Health Facilities

Press Release | Medsphere | January 7, 2015

Medsphere Systems Corporation...today joined the growing chorus of voices supporting the Behavioral Health Information Technology Act of 2013 (S.1517). This legislation, introduced by Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) a little more than a year ago, would amend the Public Health Service and Social Security acts to define behavioral and mental health professionals as healthcare providers, making behavioral health hospitals eligible for Meaningful Use financial incentives for adopting EHRs. Read More »

mHealth, Health IT Investment Break Records In Q1 Of 2014

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | April 8, 2014

Investment in mobile health and other health IT technologies has been off the charts during the first quarter of 2014, says a new report by Rock Health, continuing the meteoric rise of mobile health technologies funded by more traditional venture capitalists and newfangled crowd-funding campaigns.  Technology companies have already scooped up more than $700 million since January of 2014, representing an 87% year-over-year growth versus the same quarter last year.

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Midland Memorial Hospital is Live with EHR Doctors, Inc. on the NHIN

Press Release | Midland Memorial Hospital, EHR Doctors, Inc. | August 3, 2011

EHR Doctors, Inc. and Midland Memorial Hospital announced today that Midland Memorial Hospital is now live with the Social Security Administration (SSA) MEGAHIT project. EHR Doctors, Inc. became the first nationwide health information exchange to connect to the Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN) and the SSA MEGAHIT project.

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Notes on the October Joint Meeting of the Standards and Policy Committee

Today the future of interoperability was discussed and endorsed by a joint meeting of the Standards and Policy Committees. We began with a preamble clearly stating that the roadmap we’re working on is a process not a finished product. Karen DeSalvo, Jacob Reider, Paul Tang and I offered framing comments for the day... Read More »

Open Source EHRs: Will They Support Clinical Data Needs of the Future? (Part 2 of 2)

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | November 18, 2014

The first part of this article provided a view of the current data needs in health care and asked whether open source electronic health records could solve those needs. I’ll pick up here with a look at how some open source products deal with the two main requirements I identified: interoperability and analytics. Interoperability, in health care as in other areas of software, is supported better by open source products than by proprietary ones. Read More »

OSEHRA 2013: Open Source EHR Summit Registration Opens

Press Release | OSEHRA | June 13, 2013

The Open Source Electronic Health Records Agent (OSEHRA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating innovation in electronic health record software, announces that registration is open for its 2nd Annual Open Source EHR Summit & Workshop. OSEHRA’s goal is to drive rapid innovation in electronic health records and health IT through an Open Source software process involving the community of software developers, clinicians, business leaders and other practitioners. The Open Source electronic health record (EHR) enterprise is gaining tremendous momentum in the private and public sectors; and the number of private company contributors participating in the Open Source EHR endeavor is growing steadily.
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OSEHRA Corporate Membership Doubles as Interest in Open Source EHRs Surges

Press Release | OSEHRA | November 3, 2014

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) is pleased to announce that its Corporate Membership has doubled in the latter half of 2014. This expansion demonstrates a growing interest in open source and follows OSEHRA’s very successful 3rd Annual Open Source Summit. Read More »

OSEHRA Receives ANSI Accreditation as a Standards Development Organization

Press Release | OSEHRA | February 24, 2015

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) is pleased to announce that it has been accredited as a Standards Development Organization (SDO) by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).  This accreditation allows OSEHRA to begin utilizing its approved operating procedures to document consensus and create OSEHRA-sponsored American National Standards. “We are very proud to have received accreditation,” said Dr. Seong K. Mun, President of OSEHRA.  “The forthcoming OSEHRA quality standard and the associated certification process will raise trust and confidence in newly introduced code, adding value and strength to the open source community.”

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RAIN Live Oak Demonstrates New Standard for Healthcare Provider Directories

Press Release | RAIN Live Oak | February 26, 2015

Last month, RAIN Live Oak, a member of the California Association of Health Information Exchanges, participated in the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Connectathon 2015 to demonstrate the IHE Profile for Healthcare Provider Directory (HPD). Participation in the Connectahon, a week-long interoperability-testing event, was a significant opportunity for the advancement of the HPD standard, which supports management of healthcare provider information in a directory structure, and it proved to be an undeniable success. RAIN is a participant of the California Trusted Exchange Network (CTEN), which utilizes a federated architecture for Directory Services using HPD specifications. Read More »

Release of the VistA Evolution Program Plan and VistA 4 Product Roadmap

Press Release | OSEHRA | May 9, 2014

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has requested OSEHRA’s assistance in publicizing two key documents: the VistA Evolution Program Plan and the VistA 4 Product Roadmap. These official reports, submitted to Congress in March of this year, contain a wealth of information and specific plans to make VistA a state-of-the-art electronic health record.

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Rep. Burgess' Office Releases Draft Interoperability Bill for Discussion

The office of Rep. Michael Burgess, MD (R-TX) released a draft of the interoperability bill that they have been working for the past several months on Friday. Rep. Burgess, one of the few physicians in Congress, has been working very hard with his staff to come up with legislation that can fix the current Health IT "lock-in" crisis. This is a bipartisan effort that has full backing from the top leadership in Congress. The staff is seeking input from the Health IT community on the draft bill. Burgess's office will take comments on the draft through March 13. Rep. Burgess' staff was kind enough to provide Open Health News with a copy of the draft legislation. We have posted the entire draft bill as is below and will be writing some our thoughts over the next few days. 

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RWJF Report: Time to Transition to a Post-HITECH World?

Context and perspective matter. And it’s often both context and perspective that are lacking from the daily snapshots we get of health information technology, meaningful use, interoperability and the progress we are either making or not making, depending on your perspective. So I welcome a report like the one the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) released last month on the state of health information technology circa 2015 in these United States. Subtitled “Transition to a Post-HITECH World,” the detailed report, created in collaboration with the University of Michigan School of Communication, the Harvard School of Public Health and Mathematica Policy Research, takes a 10,000-feet view of the ongoing digitalization of healthcare and what the priorities are as we approach the terminus of HITECH.

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SynApps Solutions and Alfresco Launch Open Source VNA Medical Content Platform

Press Release | SynApps | March 26, 2015

Content management leader SynApps Solutions and key technology partner Alfresco are today launching the Open Source VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive) medical data system for the UK health market – based on Alfresco’s award-winning technology and functionality from integration leader J4Care, delivered and supported via SynApps’ extensive professional skills and resources. VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive) platform is a strongly-emerging standards-based way of extending PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) services to manage DICOM and other format content so as to make the sharing of medical and patient information as easy, secure and safe as possible.

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True Interoperability: Public API’s Provide the Open Platform Health IT Requires

Do we finally have the spark? Interoperability is the current health IT buzzword because it’s the essential ingredient in creating a system that benefits patients, doctors and hospitals. Almost everyone in healthcare is pressing for it and is frustrated, though probably not surprised, that Meaningful Use did not get us there. Read More »

US Hospitals Facing Financial Squeeze-Mass Closures

In the last year, the profitability of U.S. hospitals eroded for the first time since the Great Recession, pushing some closer to and others over the solvency precipice. Revenues are down and costs are up.  And these issues appear systemic and entrenched, giving rise to a series of important and relevant questions: How can hospitals adapt?  If they do, will they still survive? And, do we as a nation think it’s important to make hospitals accessible, even if they lose money? Read More »