adoption

Over the past few years several different surveys have claimed different rates of health IT adoption. The Department of Health and Human Services is attempting to get to the bottom of the issue by commissioning a series of surveys designed to accurately measure how doctors and hospitals are using different types of technology. George Washington University and the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Institute for Health Policy will conduct the research. The partnership's first report, …

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced $22.3 million in grants to state health information technology projects intended to drive health IT adoption. Sixteen awards have been announced, bringing total AHRQ investment in health IT to $166 million so far. Key grants go to Franklin Foundation Hospital in coastal Louisiana, the Metro DC Health Information Exchange (MeDHIX), the University of Tennessee and the Holomua project in Hawaii.

- see this press release from AHRQ

Contradicting earlier media reports which had suggested the government's release of discounted VistA-Office for physicians was about to be placed on "indefinite hold," CMS said the release of the software will go ahead as scheduled. On Monday, CMS spokesman Don McLeod denied that the product launch had been canceled, saying the release will probably go ahead "in the next couple of days." The plan to distribute the discounted product to physicians has run into some cynicism from …

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid announced that a plan to distribute VistA, the open-source EMR system originally developed by the Department of Veteran's Affairs, has been put on "indefinite hold." The news does not appear to mean that the project has been canceled -- at least not yet. Quality Improvement Group director Dr. Karen Bell said the Department of Health and Human Services plans to move forward with the initiative, which is intended to boost EHR adoption among small …

This week the Clinton/Frist (or should it be Frist/Clinton?) legislation got on breakfast time TV, and Brailer's office announced that it was going to be starting the first few pilots towards interoperability with some $60 million available. A more ambitious $4 billion bill was introduced, too, although that won't go anywhere unless someone adds the words "Terror" or "Iraq" to the …

With concern high that many HIV positive people are spreading the disease because they do not know their status, experts are calling for the adoption of the faster, but also much more expensive NAAT test, which can pick up the virus in its earliest stages. The CDC says the technology needs to be tested. Story

 
Walking the floor at the TEPR show this week brought home the wonders of electronic medical records. The show had a multitude of presentations on EMR use, but more than 35 years after the first EMRs were developed we're still early in the adoption cycle. Most presentations were about fairly small-scale case studies. But despite the exit of hundreds of firms from the EMR and …