ARRA/HITECH

The Office for the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) has updated its Health IT Dashboard to include from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs public use files. The Meaningful Use dashboard is there to act as an interactive supplement to CMS’ public use data and reports using the ONC’s Health IT Dashboard framework as the starting point, the government announced this week.

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced modest changes to some of the technical requirements under Stage 2 of the meaningful use process under the HITECH Act. In an interim rule set to be published Dec. 7, CMS announced that it was replacing a small number of standards with new versions, and changing or exempting some meaningful use measures to allow providers to fulfill them in a more flexible way.

With the rapid adoption of audiovisual technology into healthcare, healthcare CIOs and other healthcare IT leaders face the difficult decision of how to balance their organizations’ investment dollars against budgetary constraints, security, and selection of technology that is appropriate to the provider organization’s IT infrastructure. At a roundtable discussion, “Balancing Innovation, Budget Constraints, and Network Security,” part of the Technology Crossroads Conference that was put on by the National eHealth Collaborative in Washington, D.C., last week, expert panelists discussed wide-raging topics confronting provider organizations against the backdrop of the fast-changing technology landscape, including technology investments, cost pressures, health information exchange, network security, cloud computing, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

A new report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has determined that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) faces obstacles in the Medicare EHR incentive program because it does not verify whether the self-reported information from providers is accurate and thus the integrity of the program is in question. The OIG charges CMS with not implementing “strong prepayment safeguards,” in the 38-page report, released this week.

A House subcommittee on Science, Space and Technology held a hearing this week on Meaningful Use. The focus on Meaningful Use was to ask the question, "has the program truly been meaningful?" The response from all witness, which included ONC National Coordinator Dr. Farzad Mostashari and Intermountain VP & CIO Marc Probst, was a resounding "Yes."