ahrq news from FierceHealthIT

HHS's Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONCHIT) has released its five-year strategic plan, designed to help federal agencies synch up their health IT efforts. While the plan is broad, Read more...

A new Government Accountability Office report has underscored a problem already quite familiar to FierceHealthIT readers--that pulling together care quality data is a heck of a problem. The recently-released GAO report reviewed eight hospitals' efforts to collect data on measures specified by CMS. (These are the data sets CMS requires hospitals to submit if they want Medicare payment increases.) The case studies concluded that while existing IT systems play a role, they …

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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 …

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While collecting quality data for health plans, state and federal regulators still costs providers a bundle, implementing the right health IT infrastructure could ease the strain, according by a new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Right now, either hospital medical records departments or medical group practice administrators end up collecting the data, a costly and time-consuming exercise which only gets more taxing from year to year. Still, until …

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