Kentucky and Maine are increasingly harnessing data from various state agencies to improve care delivery and reign in healthcare costs.

Patients weigh in on the good, bad and ugly of EMRs, tackling whether they are mostly instruments to maximize patient billings, whether they interfere with physician-patient interactions and how they improve care coordination.

Buy-in to state-sponsored health IT initiatives and health information exchanges requires developing in-person, on-the-ground connections with Medicaid providers.

In a post HITECH world, states are shifting from health IT adoption to data sharing and analytics. The primary goal of National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, is “meaningful interoperability” by 2017, and states are just beginning to explore data integration and the challenges that come with it.

The Federal Health Architecture is partnering with Open Health Tools to migrate the governance and code management of CONNECT, an open source software solution that enables secure health information exchange to their open source community.

Sixty percent of those who responded to an EHR governance study have a formalized EHR governance structure in place.

An initiative by the Washington State Health Care Authority to use big data in emergency departments reduced unnecessary visits by Medicaid beneficiaries by 10 percent.

A new security risk assessment (SRA) tool from the Department of Health & Human Services is designed to help guide healthcare providers in small to medium-sized offices conduct risk assessments of their organizations.