Certification

Even a cursory glance at this year's Healthcare Informatics 100 list provides fascinating glimpses into the current state of the healthcare IT vendor market, when this year's list showing 2010 revenues is compared to previous years' lists documenting 2009 and 2008 revenues. With only three exceptions, every single vendor whose revenues are listed in this year's compendium has seen increased revenues between 2009 and 2010, and many vendors have seen considerable upticks, some through expansion or acquisition

To mark the Beacon Communities one-year anniversary, the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings (Washington, D.C.) in collaboration with The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) hosted “Health IT in an Era of Accountable Care: Update from the Beacon Communities,” a half-day meeting, to highlight the progress Beacon communities were making around health system improvement and payment reform. Aneesh Chopra, CTO, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that physicians in Beacon communities and beyond were now “open to dream the dreams [they] dreamt in medical school” because meaningful use allowed the possibilities to coordinate patient care more effectively and optimize billing that past siloed systems didn’t support.

Childs Medical Clinic received $18,000 for its attesting eligible professional (EP) Hayden Childs, M.D., having satisfied the 90-continuous days of meaningful use reporting merged with allowable tracking to achieve the incentives thresholds. Despite the fact of the small scale and the relative isolation of the Childs Medical Clinic (Samson is located in far southeast Alabama, just a few miles north of the Florida panhandle), Jule Child and her eight colleagues in the clinic were determined early on to pursue meaningful use under the federal American Reinvestment and Recovery Act/Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (ARRA-HITECH) Act.

Among the small number of integrated health systems to complete the attestation process on April 18, the first day in which attestation of the fulfillment of the stage 1 requirements for meaningful use under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act was possible, was the 11-hospital, 24-facility, 4,100-bed Texas Health Resources (THR), based in Arlington, Tex.

Members from the HIT Policy and HIT Standards Committee concluded this week that recommendations first laid out in the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report are too ambitious, echoing CHIME’s comments submitted in January. According to the PCAST workgroup, an end-to-end universal exchange standard that utilizes metadata tags instead of standardization is simply not feasible for Stage 2 Meaningful Use inclusion.