Archive for the ‘HIE’ Category

The sound of HIMSS 13 has quieted and now the work continues to follow through on the connections made and the initiatives launched. The CommonWell Health Alliance is one that will be closely watched as the work unfolds. Work is what will be required to make the CommonWell initiative happen. There are doubts as to [...]

The University of Texas at Austin formally launches its Health Information Exchange (HIE) laboratory this week. This laboratory simulates the national, state and local networks that are being developed to electronically exchange medical data. To provide more insights on this initiative, we caught up with Dr. Leanne Field, director of the nine-week Health IT certificate program at The [...]

Last Thursday the Supreme Court got us a present for our birthday, the plan we deserve, aka the Affordable Care Act. It was a grand compromise of a bill and a decision that each person in the country can love and hate at the same time. There’s something for everyone, but there’s mostly a lot [...]

Of course there were the themes of HIEs and ACOs, but they were also major talking points at last year’s HIMSS conference. Below are five new themes that I observed in sessions at HIMSS 2012. Data-Driven Healthcare is the Buzzword “Data-driven healthcare” was a repeated phrase in several presentations throughout the conference. In the education [...]

In December 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released the names of 32 health organizations selected to participate in their Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) model, which launched just over one month ago on Jan. 1. Chosen from 80 applicants, these 32 Pioneer ACOs are testing several new payment arrangements, which [...]

With Meaningful Use requirements, connecting to Health Information Exchanges, coordinating data flow in Accountable Care Organizations, updating devices to ICD-10 codes and general interoperability projects, there is a tremendous amount of work going on in Health IT. With very significant deadlines to accomplish these vital initiatives, it would be easy for IT managers to develop [...]

Several questions can arise when considering whether to parse the data of a CCD document from a remote facility and merge it into the local EHR. HIEs are spurring increased emphasis on the use of CCD documents to exchange information among facilities, so it would be ideal to have consistent practices regarding the merging of [...]

The IHE Connectathon event for 2012 was held in Chicago last week. Connectathon allows vendors from healthcare IT to test their ability to support IHE profiles, which are critical to standardizing communications across HIEs, ACOs, and across regions. Here are a few observations from my first-time participation at Connectathon: Industry Buy-in It was apparent from [...]

The primary characteristic of a CDA document is that it must be readable by humans. The CDA specification states that, “human readability guarantees that a receiver of a CDA document can algorithmically display the clinical content of the note on a standard Web browser.” This requirement means that a clinician or patient can take a [...]

We’ve all heard and can probably sing along to the classic song Small Town by John Mellencamp, which romanticizes growing up and living in some place other than the big city. I, too, am what most would consider “small town,” and every time I hear that song I can’t deny getting flashbacks of Main Street [...]