standards report news from FierceHealthIT

With some core data already defined, it's looking like the pace of health IT standards development is likely to pick up. According to John Halamka, chairman of the Healthcare Information Technology Read more...

A pair of lobbying groups have been pushing hard to see the U.S. Congress pass health IT legislation that establishes national technology standards, before technology vendors go further down the road Read more...

CMS is getting serious about e-prescribing. The agency is eliminating a regulatory loophole that allowed providers and pharmacies to fax prescriptions rather than send them electronically. The change Read more...

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 …

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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 …

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Medical IT giant Cerner has launched a new card which will make health savings account (HSA) money immediately accessible at the point of care. Known as a "Healthe," the card will not only serve as a health plan ID, but will also allow consumers to debit HSAs. Healthe cards will also offer consumers the option of linking the card to a line of credit. Cerner is launching the Healthe card in partnership with Greenwood Village, CO-based First Data Healthcare Services and Kansas City-based …

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Another health system has jumped into e-prescribing with both feet. This time it's Columbia, OH-based OhioHealth, a health system including 15 hospitals, 20 health and surgery centers, home health and DME services. Working with e-prescription vendor RxNT of Annapolis, OhioHealth has rolled out e-prescribing to its 2,300 physicians. RxNT's technology allows physicians to both transmit prescriptions and receive messages back from pharmacies, including electronic refill requests. The RxNT …

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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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HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt unveiled a new initiative on Friday which would rely heavily on advanced health IT tools to individualize and improve patient care.
Leavitt's "Personalized Health Care" program will link genetic information with traditional health records on a large scale, in an effort to predict and thereby prevent the onset of many diseases. Leavitt has said that this effort will be one of his top priorities for the next two years.

Overall, HHS agencies like the …

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Jumping on board an initiative kicked off by HHS secretary Michael Leavitt, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed an order pushing healthcare providers to adopt more health information technology and make pricing and quality information more readily available. The state, which has set a goal of 100 percent electronic data exchange within 10 years, will now push for HIT by supporting organizations that use e-prescribing and other health data exchange technologies.

The …

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