Dear Healthcare IT Insider,
As those of you who attended HIMSS 2012 know, the conference was incredibly large and bustling with seemingly nonstop activity, as befitting its Las Vegas setting. In fact, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society reported that attendance broke all records and topped 37,000.
But there was a showstopper in all the activity when keynote speaker Dr. Farzad Mostashari, head of the Office of the National Coordinator of Healthcare IT (ONC), announced some of the new requirements being proposed for stage 2 of meaningful use adoption of electronic records. Senior editor Erik L. Ridley was in attendance to report that imaging had finally made the cut. Click here to read his coverage.
As soon as the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) made the proposed rules public, staff writer Kate Madden Yee took a deep breath and delved into the more than 100-page document. Read what she learned here.
We thought it timely to ask the American College of Radiology (ACR) to comment, and the resulting article is the Insider Exclusive for this newsletter. You, as members of the Healthcare IT Digital Community, are getting the story several days prior to its official publication date.
Maintaining security, or lack thereof, was another hot topic at HIMSS 2012. Read about escalating HIT threats here and the risk that imaging modalities pose here.
After all the promotion at HIMSS about how electronic health records (EHR) would reduce costs, what should be published but an article in Health Affairs that claims that physician access through EHRs to radiology reports could increase the number of imaging exams ordered. This raised a ruckus at ONC, which you can read about here.
There's a lot more to note, so do take time to review the list below. We're sure you'll find something newsworthy that you may have overlooked.
