The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) Tuesday released a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) for the establishment of two certification programs for purposes of testing and certifying health ITone temporary and one permanent.

ATLANTAMeaningful usea concept introduced one year agoappears to be spurring an increase in health IT spending along with a brightening economy, according to the 21 annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) leadership survey, released today during the societys conference.

ATLANTAWhether enough is being done to protect the rights of patient data, while simultaneously allowing for health information to be exchanged amongst care providers under the proposed meaningful use definitions, became an area of contention during today's Meaningful Use Town Hall discussion during the CIO Forum, co-hosted by CHIME and HIMSS, at the HIMSS10 conference.

Rates for hospital inpatient and outpatient services have inflated by 8 percent in the past 12 months, 2 percent higher than 2008, according to a budget projection report published by Novation.

  A list of the covered entities that have reported health information data breaches impacting more than 500 people now has been posted by the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on its Web site.

David Blumenthal, MD, the National Coordinator for Health IT, addressed the efforts thus far made by the Health IT Standards Committees who met yesterday to report and discuss their progress in further defining and refining the interim final rule for meaningful use.

Hartford Hospital is collaborating with NextGate in a health information exchange implementation and a separate workflow integration project using NextGate's MatchMetrix indexing software to identify a patient across various encounters and locations within and beyond the Connecticut-based Hartford Healthcare system.

Mary Lanning Memorial Hospital, in Hastings, Neb., has joined the Nebraska Health Information Initiative, a nonprofit statewide health information exchange (HIE) designed to share clinical and administrative data among providers using Axolotls Elysium Exchange platform.