November 2009

Health IT panel to heed calls for simpler EHR standards

A panel advising the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) said it will heed the overwhelming consensus it has received in recent public comments to develop the simplest possible certification standards for accelerating health IT adoption. The Health IT Standards Committee's implementation workgroup reported today that it distilled the testimony of industry organizations within and outside healthcare, as well as contributors to its public blog. The participants provided details of their experiences with adopting standards. On the blog, physicians and practices have reported that they have difficulty improving quality and productivity with their existing electronic health record systems. As a result, they are looking for the standards to provide a "pathway to success."

Meaningful use rule 'on target' for end of year

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is still on target to publish by the end of the year a proposed rule on the meaningful use of electronic health records, despite growing fears from industry about the possible impact of the regulation. Tony Trenkle, director of the Office of e-Health Standards and Services at CMS, said he had been spending a lot of time with health industry folks who have expressed "concerns and fears" about what will be in the regulation. Those include how high the bar will be set for meeting meaningful use targets during the first year of implementation, and whether the industry will be able to meet them, he told a meeting today of National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS). Other concerns include whether hospitals outpatient clinics would be eligible to receive separate payments, whether quality measures will disadvantage specialty health providers, and worries particularly by the states about whether CMS would be able to harmonize Medicare and Medicaid requirements.

Health Care and Fort Hood Dominate the Blogs

For the second week in a row, the fallout from the November 5 Fort Hood shooting was a major topic in the blogosphere. But it had to compete with the health care bill in the House, which triggered opposition from conservative commentators and mixed feelings from liberal bloggers upset about an amendment that prohibited federal funds for abortions. For the week of November 9-13, 22% of the links in blogs and social media were to news-related stories about health care reform according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. This marks only the second time since the NMI began in January 2009 that the health care debate was the No. 1 topic in the blogosphere and social media. The first occurred during the week of August 10-14 (23% of the links) when supporters and opponents of President Obama's health care goals traded accusations of deception and dishonesty.

Meaningful Silence Deafening for Health IT Industry

[Commentary] For the health IT industry, the silence is deafening. There's little that can be said about the looming release of meaningful use definitions for electronic health records that will be made public in about a month. There's growing concern among hospitals about the challenge before them in implementing clinical record systems on a fairly fast track. Providers still are wary of how the reimbursement plan will work and whether it will be equitable.

House Passes Bill To Create EHR Loan Program for Physicians

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved a bill (HR 3014) designed to help health care providers purchase electronic health record systems and other health IT tools. The Small Business Health IT Financing Act would authorize the Small Business Administration to oversee a loan program for health care providers seeking to purchase health IT systems

Academe and the Decline of News Media

[Commentary] Newspapers, newsmagazines, and broadcast-news outlets are drastically cutting staff members, bureaus, page counts, and news holes—that is, when they're not simply going out of business. The Chronicle Review asked some prominent thinkers on issues of education, communications, and news and cultural literacy how the decline of those news media will affect higher education.

To Build a Smart Grid, Start With Smart Meters

The smart grid requires a major shift. For it to work, meters must collect information not once a month for billing, but every few minutes, a huge amount of data, so a utility can save energy by channeling only as much electricity as an area needs at a time. An industrial area might need large amounts of power in the day, but less at night. New smart meters also need two-way communication. Before they just sent billing information to the power company. Now a power company needs to send instructions back through the meter to home appliances, like a thermostat, that can be adjusted by a few degrees on a hot day to avoid a brownout. The idea is that if electricity is used more efficiently, fewer plants will have to be built, pollution will be reduced and people will save money. While everyone seems to know what they want the smart grid to do, few agree on how to do it. Each meter company wants to establish its design for the grid as part of the standard. The first recommendation will come from the National Institute of Standards and Technology next month. The standard will continue to evolve by a consensus of state and federal regulators.

Policy Makers' Privacy Concerns Spread Beyond the Internet

Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers' personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes. In recent years, marketers have grown more adept at culling consumer data from an array of online and offline sources -- including real-estate and motor-vehicle records, consumer surveys, credit-card data and logs of Web visitors' online behavior -- to identify the most receptive audiences for their ads. At a hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee plans to explore the impact of these practices on consumer privacy, and will hear from witnesses including advertising giant WPP, database-marketing company Acxiom, privacy advocates and others. Separately, the Federal Trade Commission, which has taken a more active role in policing online privacy this year, is preparing to take a wider look at data-collection practices at a roundtable meeting in December with representatives of the ad, media and technology industries and consumer groups.

Television last frontier of innovation?

In just one year, the hottest cell phones went from the flip Motorola Razor to mobile computers like the iPhone. Lightening-fast innovations are taking place throughout technology, except for one area: the television. That was a concern voiced by officials at the Federal Communications Commission yesterday, who identified a lack of competition and innovation in the television set-top-box market as a key hurdle to the adoption of broadband Internet. In its charge to blanket the country with affordable Internet access, the FCC is looking broadly at problems throughout the communications industry. It's already upsetting telecom and cable companies whose businesses are being scrutinized as it reviews a federal fund for phone service and the potential use of broadcast spectrum for mobile Internet use. Yesterday, they got under the skin of the cable and satellite industries with a critique of their use of set top boxes, which the agency said are not embracing the convergence of online video with regular old television models.

Small cable, online video companies warn of anticompetition in Comcast, NBC merger

What worries cable and online video companies most about the expected merger between Comcast and NBC Universal? They say the combined entertainment giant would have too much control over a wide body of content. And it could make it difficult for competitors to offer NBC broadcast and cable shows and Universal movies in the same way Comcast subscribers would receive it. RCN, a smaller cable operator based in Herndon, Va., says a merger between Comcast and NBC Universal would be "bad for competition and therefore bad for consumers." The company said it fears that such an entertainment Goliath could hurt smaller cable competitors who already struggle getting good programming to their consumers. Even with federal rules that ensure choice programming held by Comcast is available to competing cable operators, it says Comcast doesn't always do so easily.

Benton

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