HIT Market

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released the Health IT Patient Safety Action and Surveillance Plan, which builds on the Department’s overall commitment to patient safety.

The dramatic December 19 announcement by Allscripts that its CEO, Glen Tullman, had resigned, and that a replacement for Tullman had already been named, capped a year of drama, not only for the Chicago-based software vendor, but for all of healthcare and healthcare IT. A look back at a year of whirlwind developments.

According to the Frisco,Texas-based Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), its latest updates to the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF), will allow healthcare organization to more easily perform and manage CSF assessments, through a newly-created web-based tool and other upgrades. HITRUST, a collaboration of various healthcare, security, and risk management leaders, has created the CSF for healthcare organizations to “manage their information protection programs.”

The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), a Chicago-based nonprofit, has announced plans to develop an IT framework for accountable care organizations (ACOs). The framework will identify the health IT infrastructure components necessary for a provider organization to function effectively as an ACO and help identify any gaps that would prevent them from meeting their goals as an ACO.

Moving forward in so many areas, including under meaningful use, will require the establishment of genuine interoperability across the inpatient-outpatient divide, and in particular, far more automated connectivity between hospitals and physicians, including those doctors in private practice. But building bridges in this area is far more complex than it first appears, say healthcare IT leaders who are guiding their organizations forward say the healthcare IT leaders who are guiding their organizations forward nationwide.