Leila Samy | July 8, 2014
Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs), some with a census of fewer than 10 patients, are the smallest of the small rural hospitals. In some regions, such as frontier areas, a CAH may be the only local health care provider serving an area the width of the state of Rhode Island! CAHs are small, geographically isolated and have limited resources.
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John Rancourt | June 27, 2014
A coalition of states, in partnership with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, successfully completed a pilot project for the interstate exchange of electronic behavioral health data using Direct. This activity illuminated some of the real challenges with using Direct, both technical and operational, but ultimately demonstrated that such exchanges can be performed.
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Dr. Karen B. DeSalvo | June 5, 2014
Today we are pleased to release Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure. This paper describes ONC’s broad vision and framework for interoperability and is an invitation to health IT stakeholders – clinicians, consumers, hospitals, public health, technology developers, payers, researchers, policymakers and many others – to join ONC in developing a defined, shared roadmap that will allow us to collectively achieve health IT interoperability as a core foundational element of better care,
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Lee Stevens | May 14, 2014
As we approach 2014 National Hurricane Preparedness Week (May 25-31), it seems like an appropriate time to pause and reflect on two hurricanes that have impacted the lives of many Americans, Sandy and Katrina, and the role of health information technology (health IT). ONC has long supported the use of health IT and health information exchange services to support emergency preparedness and response efforts, and the lessons learned from both of these natural disasters have helped to inform future efforts and to protect patient information to make sure that it is available to patients and providers where and when it is needed.
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Matthew Swain | May 5, 2014
Hospitals across the country continue to adopt health IT such as electronic health record (EHRs) to improve the health and health care of their patients. ONC posted the latest results [PDF – 933kb] from the 2013 American Hospital Association’s (AHA) Annual Health IT Survey, which show that more than nine out of ten hospitals possess certified EHR technology, and nearly six in ten hospitals adopted an EHR with advanced functionalities (classified as a Basic EHR).
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