In comments submitted to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) voiced concern about hospital readiness to submit accurate and complete quality data by way of EHR systems.

In a departure from other organizations' comments on the proposed rule for Meaningful Use Stage 3, the Rhode Island Quality Institute has advocated for accelerated standards that advance the benefits of health technology, as well as enable healthcare transformation and payment reform.

Rex Hospital, a member of University of North Carolina (UNC) Health Care in North Carolina, has implemented Merge Hemo from Merge Healthcare to automate their cath lab processes into their electronic patient record.

2013 continues to offer developments that will have a big impact on the healthcare industry. The Department of Health and Human Services just issued its long-awaited update to the HIPAA privacy and security rules and we will bring you details and analysis on that next week. This week, however, the comment period for the proposed rule of Meaningful Use Stage 3 came to an end.

Family physicians are adopting EHRs faster than previous data suggested, reaching a nearly 70 percent adoption rate nationwide, according to findings published in Annals of Family Medicine. EHR adoption by family physicians has doubled since 2005, with researchers estimating that the adoption rate will exceed 80 percent by the end of 2013.

Stage 3 Meaningful Use measures should focus more on measuring improvements in patient outcomes rather than a large and growing collection of functional measures, the American College of Physicians wrote in comments submitted to the Health Information Technology Policy Committee regarding the proposed rule.

Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, national coordinator for health IT, announced the winning designs of printed health records to help patients better understand and use their EHRs.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has authorized four organizations to certify EHRs under the Stage 2 Meaningful Use program, known as the 2014 Edition of Certification.