Despite the recent fiscal concerns in Washington, federal money continues to flow toward health IT--at least for now. This week HHS announced three big contracts which are an integral part of the government's national dive to push for increased technology adoption in healthcare. $3.3 million goes to the American National Standards Institute to help develop interoperability standards which will hopefully allow systems to communicate with each other and exchange data, or at the least cause trouble for all those vendors using proprietary formats. A further $2.7 million goes to the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) to develop certification standards for health IT. Finally, Research Triangle Institute International was awarded $11.7 million to study privacy and security practices, work which promises to raise interesting questions to say the least.
- see this press release from HHS