As we progress to the new healthcare, keeping people healthy will force healthcare providers to do things such as prevent hospital readmissions, or keep people from needing a hospital stay at all. And that will happen only if providers have some insight into what patients are doing at home.

A Delaware regional extension center (REC) says it is the first REC in the nation to reach its goal of helping 1,000 primary care providers achieve Stage 1 of meaningful use of their electronic health record (EHR) systems.

Medical identity fraud has increased nearly 20 percent compared to the year before in the U.S., affecting an estimated 1.84 victims and having a total out-of-pocket medical costs incurred by medical identity theft victims to be $12.3 billion. Those are takeaways of the 2013 Survey on Medical Identity Theft, an annual survey now in its fourth year, which was released yesterday by the Ponemon Institute LLC, Traverse City, Mich., and sponsored by Portland, Ore.-base ID Experts. The report’s release roughly coincided with the launch (on August 29) of the Medical Identity Fraud Alliance (MIFA), an industry group formed to raise public awareness and to come up with potential ways to address the medical identity theft.

Jonathan Teich, M.D., is in a unique position to comment on the intersection of IT and physician workflow. In this Q&A with HCI’s Associate Editor, Gabriel Perna, Dr. Teich shares his thoughts on health IT, specifically clinical decision support (CDS) systems, and how they fit into the workflow of a clinician.