The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Beacon Community program, established under the HITECH act, gives grants to local communities to explore health IT innovations. Three Beacon Communities that have been piloting text-message-based diabetes interventions published a paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research detailing some challenges and best practices...
Departing national health IT coordinator Dr. Farzad Mostashari would prefer that the Food and Drug Administration unilaterally issue a long-anticipated final guidance on mobile medical apps rather than waiting for inter-agency consensus with the Federal Communications Commission and Mostashari's own Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
"I testified before Congress...
Humetrix's iBlueButton app won the ONC's Blue Button Mashup Challenge in January.
With new, tougher HIPAA privacy regulations set to take effect in less than a week, the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which enforces the rules, is trying to educate consumers and healthcare entities alike about a longstanding but much-ignored policy.
"There is a clear right [in the HIPAA privacy rule] not...
Humetrix iBlueButton app won the ONC's Blue Button Mashup Challenge.
Patient engagement is on the minds of a lot of people in healthcare, spurred not only by a requirement in Stage 2 Meaningful Use regulations, but by imperatives to improve the quality of care and boost patient satisfaction. Some providers beginning to open their minds, but technical and cultural challenges stand in the way,...
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) launched its data access framework initiative this week, an effort to increase interoperability among electronic health records (EHRs) from different vendors. Creating a data standard for all EHRs will empower patients who are switching from one provider to another, help smaller practices analyze and learn from their...
A large, multi-state anesthesia group will use the iPad version of Shareable Ink's Anesthesia Cloud EHR module to help clinicians document patient encounters at all 25 of its practice locations, Nashville, Tenn.-based Shareable Ink announced Tuesday.
The group, Resolute Anesthesia and Pain Solutions, has been piloting the system at its flagship Boca Raton, Fla., location as physicians there work...
When MobiHealthNews first reported on personal health records (PHR) startup Cognovant in May 2012, the story warned about a "graveyard" of PHR failure. Cognovant, like many others before it, saw PHRs as the potential hub of interoperability for healthcare consumers that so far has eluded many provider-centric electronic health records (EHRs).
Cognovant, of Kansas City, Mo., recently joined that...
The Patient Privacy Rights Foundation, the organization founded by Texas psychiatrist Dr. Deborah Peel, is trying to shed the perception that it is anti-health IT by naming physician-entrepreneur Dr. Adrian Gropper its first-ever chief technology officer.
Gropper, who founded picture archiving and communications system (PACS) vendor Amicas in 1996 and launched ill-fated personal health records (...
Some time last month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) quietly filled its long-vacant Director of Healthcare Initiatives position, responding to a call made last September by its mHealth task force. The FCC's appointee, Matthew Quinn, is no stranger to healthcare innovation. With a background in two previous government agencies and a number of large and small healthcare companies,...
The Department of Health and Human Services has formed a new workgroup, charged with "identifying key considerations to improve patient safety and promote innovation in health information technology (Health IT), including mobile medical applications." The group has been selected by HHS and the FCC and will report to the Health IT Policy Committee which advises the ONC.
This is the same workgroup...
