The Georgia Hospital Association (GHA) has awarded CSC with a contract to help them meet “meaningful use” standards to receive the federal incentive payments outlined in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (ARRA). CSC has already started an assessment of what changes Georgia hospitals need to make to receive funds and how long [...]

Adam Clark is the Director of Research and Policy at the Lance Armstrong Foundation and also serves as a patient advocate on the Health IT Policy committee and its certification and adoption workgroup. He recently sat down with us to discuss the “meaningful” use criteria and future health IT trends. GovConExecutive: Could you briefly tell [...]

The Washington D.C. Medicaid agency, Department of Health Care Finance (DHCF), is planning to use federal funding to create a health information exchange (HIE) network. DHCF has given MedPlus, the health IT division of Quest Diagnostics, a $7 million contract to create the network. MedPlus will provide the technology and services to create the HIE, [...]

On August 27, The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is hosting a “code-a-thon” for open-source programmers to collaborate and contribute to the new National Health Information Network (NHIN) gateway, CONNECT. The software was released to the open-source community this past April. “The code-a-thon gives programmers an opportunity to meet face to face and get [...]

The Governement Accountability Office (GAO) has announced that the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Veterans Administration (VA) have achieved three of the six objectives for “full interoperability” between their electronic health records (EHR). According to the report, the DoD and VA have achieved the following criteria: Demonstrating initial network gateway operability Sharing social history [...]

 The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has appointed Todd Park as Chief Technology Officer. Park is currently working as Board Director for athenahealth Inc., a healthcare IT company which he co-founded. As CTO, Park will work with the HHS and other agencies to create innovative ways to improve health care through technology. “I am extremely [...]

Krish Venkat is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cognizant’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Practice. He recently sat down with us to discuss how patient-centered healthcare can fix our healthcare system, and what Cognizant is doing to address the “meaningful use” requirements. GovConExecutive: What does Cognizant offer healthcare organizations? Krish Venkat: We offer a [...]

American Corporate Partners (ACP) and IBM are partnering to help veterans returning Iraq and Afghanistan transition in to civilian life by supplying career development, networking and small business start-up advice. IBM plans to use their volunteer recruiting program, On Demand Community, to help find mentors in New York, Raleigh/Durham, Denver, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. They [...]

Dr. Gary Klein, Chief Medical Officer for Vangent, has been selected to join the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Physicians’ Community Steering Committee. The Physicians’ Community Steering Committee works to create a unified voice for HIMSS physicians. They also oversee and lead HIMSS activities, industry initiatives, and partnerships with other national physicians associations. [...]

Google Health announced last week that it would allow patients to upload scanned documents to their personal health records (PHRs) and provide a way for patients to share their “living wills”, through the new Google partnership with the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s Caring Connections. Google Health’s goal is to help patients organize their [...]