Government IT news from FierceHealthIT

Minnesota providers and insurers will soon become the first in the United States required to file all claims electronically. A new law, which takes effect in 2009, includes all business-to-business transactions, as well as transactions between providers, insurers and the state.

The law also impacts worker's comp claims, chiropractic, dental and pharmacy claims and medical care claims filed through auto insurance plans. Insurers and providers will be required to follow a standard …

It looks like a recent data breach suffered by the Department of Veterans Affairs could be very pricey. Officials continue to deal with the recent loss of a hard drive, which disappeared from a VA medical center in Birmingham, AL in January of this year. The disk contained confidential data on any U.S. doctor billed Medicaid or Medicare through 2004, as well as more than 500,000 VA patients. To …

A member of the federal House of Representatives has introduced a new bill which ask an arm of the government to develop health integration standards for the U.S. The bill, filed by U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), would authorize the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create guidelines and mechanisms for smoothing the HIT integration process. Gordon was spurred, in part, by a 2005 Health Affairs study which found that the health system could save $77 billion …

While it might help the agencies free up resources to care for injured soldiers, it could be years before the Pentagon and the VA will be able to install a shared care management system. That's the word from senior officials, including assistant defense secretary for health affairs Stephen Jones and VA acting principal undersecretary for health Gerald Cross.

A presidential task force investigating poor outpatient treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical …

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt isn't just jazzed about U.S. EMR adoption--he's now joined an international effort to establish standard clinical terminology for use in EMRs. Here's what's going on (amidst a blizzard of acronyms): The U.S. is now one of nine charter members of the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHT-SDO). To kick off its efforts, IHT-SDO is using language developed by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), known as the Systematized …

A new federal bill is now under consideration which would help physician practices afford the cost of implementing more sophisticated health IT tools. Interestingly, the bill was shaped not solely by Congressional staffers, but also by direct input from a vendor, Carrollton, GA-based Greenway Medical Technologies, which makes software integrating EMR and practice management functions. The bill, the National Health Information Incentive Act, would offer physicians grants, loans and tax …

In a move heralded as a first of its kind, this week New York City officials announced plans to give free EMR technology to medical practices for whom 30 percent or more of their patient encounters are Medicaid-insured or uninsured. City officials say that they're the first state or large local government they're aware of which has tried this strategy (though states are arguably moving in this direction with e-prescribing technology). The city will distribute the software to about 1,500 …

CMS has put its stamp of approval on three e-prescribing standards for use in Medicare Part D transactions, after testing them jointly with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. CMS tested a larger group of standards with five pilot sites in eight states, with participants including Eden Prairie, MN-based Achieve Healthcare Information Technologies, Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, Santa Monica, CA-based Rand, Alexandra, VA-based SureScripts and University Hospitals Health …

Here's a nice example of voluntary collaboration between state governments. A group of states who got federal grants for Medicaid IT improvement have agreed to share their project results with other states, giving the others a leg up on the often-onerous development process. Twenty-seven states got a total of $103.6 million from CMS earlier this year to develop EMRs and related systems. Now about half of those states have begun sharing their work with states that didn't get the grants. …

We at FierceHealthIT are happy to hear that the U.S. Department of Defense and the state of Florida are working together to link up military EMRs and regional health information (see second story below). It's hard to argue that this is …