While some western Colorado physicians participating in the ONC's Beacon Community learning collaborative have struggled with technical issues, the growth of the medical home model and process improvement shows the potential of HIE and IT tools, according to the Commonwealth Fund.

The Department of Veterans Affairs recently awarded 33 grants to VA facilities for projects that will improve emergency health care services for women Veterans, expand women’s health education programs for VA staff, and offer telehealth programs to female Veterans in rural areas.

With the 2012 election a week away, Leavitt Partners today released analysis that shows the critical impact the elections will have on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Hanging in the balance is the execution of federal health reform as determined by the White House, Congress, statehouses and America's private health care system. Major public policy decisions pertaining to health insurance exchanges, Medicare benefits, Medicaid expansion and insurance reforms are all on the table as Americans place their vote.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, one of the world's premier academic medical centers, has selected the 3M 360 Encompass System to integrate and automate coding, clinical documentation improvement (CDI), and performance monitoring in a single workflow. The advanced technology from 3M Health Information Systems will help the organization capture complete documentation, improve coding accuracy, speed time to billing, and report outcomes data that truly reflects the care provided. The 3M 360 Encompass System addresses the inefficiencies of multiple coding and documentation processes and the added costs of unconnected systems, offering a breakthrough answer to the challenges of healthcare reform and ICD-10. The 3M solution promotes complete capture of patient severity in physician documentation to improve case mix and significantly reduces the time and resources needed to prepare physicians for ICD-10.

ADP® today announced the acquisition of privately-held PhyLogic Healthcare, a highly-respected Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) company that has served small- and mid-size U.S. medical practices since 2001. The ADP medical office software division, ADP AdvancedMD®, a provider of leading cloud practice management, electronic health record, medical scheduling, and billing applications, now offers outsourced medical billing services to practices seeking to improve revenue and offload costly and complex medical claims processing.

If health information exchanges are to fulfill their promise to remake healthcare locally, much work remains, obstacles must be overcome. Here are the five most paramount.

The American Health Information Management Association’s (AHIMA) 2011 Convention & Exhibit had a busy day of presentations and announcements Tuesday.

The American Health Information Management Association’s (AHIMA) 2011 Convention & Exhibit wraps up today in Salt Lake City. Here's a round up of what they discussed.

MediConnect Global today announced the immediate availability of the Provider Network Offering, a first-of-its-kind free service that allows healthcare providers hosting, authorized access and exchange of digitized and electronic medical records in the National Secured Archive (N.S.A.), MediConnect's secure, cloud-based medical record repository.