With the goal of helping eligible hospitals and radiology providers meet Stage 1 Meaningful Use objectives, Sectra, an international medical imaging IT company, is preparing to release Sectra RIS V 7.0. Read »

Hamilton General Hospital, located in Hamilton, Texas, announced on Aug. 10 that it has met Stage 1 meaningful use criteria for Medicare and Medicaid with the EHR from Nashville-based Healthcare Management Systems (HMS). Read »

I read an interesting column about an octogenarian woman who lived by herself, despite multiple chronic conditions including congestive heart failure, arthritis, gout and glaucoma. Her health deteriorated rapidly last year and her primary caregiver, her daughter who lived two and a half hours away, was faced with putting her independent mother in an assisted-living facility. Read »

KLAS' latest report revealed many interesting things about the EMR market, specifically in the area of acute-care EMRs for large hospitals with 200-plus beds. It's a snapshot of a market in transition, thanks to the ARRA funding. Read »

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT announced that it has authorized the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology and the Drummond Group to certify EHR products to qualify for the federal incentives for meaningful use of EHRs. Read »

One of the federal goals of having providers implement EHRs is to better track, manage and improve population health, but a recently published report by the Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) finds that EHRs aren't equipped to complete those tasks. Read »

Continuing on the theme of Monday’s blog on driving critical mass, two significant medical certification boards - the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) and the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) - have announced their intention to make health IT deployment a standard in their assessment and certification of physician competency. Read »

The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) has added three certification programs for EHRs. This is good news. Adding more specialties, namely, behavior health, dermatology and long-term and post-acute care, will help drive EHR adoption across provider groups and spread the benefits of EHRs to a greater number of patients. Read »

As we head into the next stage of EHR adoption, now that the meaningful use criteria have been finalized, it's time for health IT advocates to start rallying their physician colleagues to get serious about implementing and deriving value from EHRs. Read »

The Dept. of Health and Human Services obviously listened to the resounding criticism that the proposed meaningful use criteria were asking for too much, too soon or all or nothing. Read »