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At approximately 11 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 1, the U.S. House of Representatives concluded voting, by a margin of 257 to 167, to approve a bill that the U.S. Senate had approved at about 1:57 a.m. Tuesday, to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff” triggered on Tuesday by prior legislation passed in 2011. The legislation forestalled for several weeks the triggering of federal budget sequestration, which would have unleashed $110 billion in across-the-board federal spending cuts, including across-the-board 2-percent Medicare reimbursement cuts to healthcare providers.

Even as Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reached an agreement Monday afternoon, Dec. 31, on a tentative deal to stave off large tax increases beginning Tuesday, Jan. 1, they remained at an impasse on whether and how to prevent $110 billion in across-the-board federal spending cuts—among them Medicare reimbursement cuts, according to media reports Monday. As a result, the country will “go over the fiscal cliff,” to use a phrase initially coined by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to describe succinctly a federal budget sequestration process involving hundreds of billions of dollars in increases in federal tax rates combined with hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending cuts, all of which begin Jan. 1.

Happy New Year! In this Healthcare Informatics podcast, Jason Fortin, senior advisor at Impact Advisors, talks about Stage 2 of meaningful use. Fortin discusses talks about what should be at the top of providers’ checklist when it comes to stage 2 at the beginning of the year.

Complications of partisan politics threatened to cripple efforts to resolve the so-called “fiscal cliff” crisis on the evening of Thursday, Dec. 20, as a House Republican plan popularly known as “Plan B” failed to garner enough support to lead to a floor vote, throwing the entire process into confusion.

As I write this, President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner are involved in complex, perhaps rather tense, negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff and what to do about federal taxes, revenues and programs. In the past couple of days, the news reports and rumors have changed almost hourly, with estimates of possible Medicare cuts to providers shifting quite frequently. Whatever the end result of this process, analytics-facilitated continuous clinical performance improvement will soon be crucial to provider survival.