Baber Ghauri, MD, MBA, has joined St. Mary Medical Center as CMIO, a newly created position to help standardize processes of evidence-based quality care, the Langhorne, Pa., hospital announced. In this role, Ghauri will help develop and implement computerized provider order entry (CPOE) at St. Mary as part of a system-wide effort to support meaningful use of EHRs.

A pair of organizations representing medical groups and informaticists have issued formal comments to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) regarding the proposed Stage 2 objectives for meaningful use.

Confusion over meaningful use may have crimped EMR sales, but the market for EMR hit $15.7 billion in 2010, according to a recent report from market researcher Kalorama Information.

Robust advancement of meaningful use criteria is essential both to ensure a return on investment for taxpayers who are funding the incentives and to lay a firm foundation for meeting the broad goals of health care reform, wrote 25 consumer groups in a collective comment filed last week that that commend many components of the proposed meaningful use Stage 2 criteria included in the Health IT (HIT) Policy Committees Request for Comments.

Drummond Group, an Office of the National Coordinator Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB), has unveiled the EHR Certification Roadmap for Hospitals, a certification program for hospitals that use EHR systems developed in-house or or use systems comprised of various technologies from multiple vendors.

This is the fifth installment in CMIO's exclusive web series exploring the birth of Rhode Islands statewide health information exchange (HIE), featuring the leading stakeholders and clinical perspectives on its development. 

Regarding privacy and security of a patients health record, individuals should have the right to restrict certain services from disclosure, stated the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) in its comments on Stage 2 draft recommendations for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) EHR incentive program. 

The best way to avoid data breaches is to lock down everything. We wish. While thats not possible, data encryption and strongestablished, known and enforcedpolicies can certainly help.