Weekly round-up: more ACOs, HIE shuts down, IT workforce
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| Beth Walsh, Editor, CMIO |
All of the activity related to health IT requires people to implement and manage the systems. The HITECH Act provided the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) with approximately $2 billion to prepare a workforce for increasingly high-tech healthcare settings.
During a July 11 National eHealth Collaborative webinar, presenters said that efforts are underway to cultivate the anticipated shortage of 50,000 workers needed to help providers achieve meaningful use.
Since the program’s inception, 13,000 have received training through the community college consortia and 1,300 are currently enrolled in university-based training. The programs prepare enrollees for 12 separate healthcare roles, including implementation support specialist, privacy and security specialist, software engineer and health IT trainer.
The ONC issued a policy brief on the barriers preventing access to personal health information. Those barriers include lack of awareness among patients of their legal right to have a copy of their records, and cultural and operational challenges.
Also announced this week was the shutdown of the Health Information Partnership for Tennessee three years after the organization was formed to orchestrate statewide health information exchange (HIE) efforts. A statement referred to the desire to operate from a clean slate.
In other news, 89 new accountable care organizations (ACOs) serving 1.2 million Medicare patients in 40 states and Washington, D.C. officially entered into agreements with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as of July 1.
The new group joins 65 other healthcare organizations participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program and similar cost-sharing initiatives, bringing the total number of ACOs to 154 and the total number of patients served by ACOs to more than 2.4 million, according to a July 9 CMS statement.
Til next week—thanks for reading.
Beth Walsh
CMIO Editor
bwalsh@trimedmedia.com
Beth Walsh,
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.