A Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) decision to delay the date when Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs) will start looking for inpatient claims that should have been billed as outpatient observation because of their short duration (less than a day defined as two midnights in the hospital) will buy hospitals and the groups that represent them time to fight CMS-1599-F (commonly known as the “2-Midnight Rule”).

Less than 10 percent of physician practices reported that they had made significant progress when rating their overall readiness for ICD-10 implementation, up only slightly (from 4.7 percent) since June 2013, when the Medical Group Management Association previously assessed readiness levels.

Health Resources and Services Administration funded health center controlled networks are struggling to establish the capability to achieve Meaningful Use objectives related to sharing data, according to an Office of the Inspector General report.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is actively recruiting new members for two of its federal advisory committees: the Health IT Standards Committee and the Health IT Policy Committee, according to a Feb. 5 blog post by ONC Health IT Policy Analyst Michelle Consolazio.

The Office of the Inspector General’s Work Plan for fiscal 2014 places added attention on the security and integrity of health IT, both for EHRs and networked medical devices within hospitals.

Rollout of ICD-11 has been postponed to 2017 by the World Health Organization.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has amended rules covering how laboratory test results are communicated to patients to allow patients to skip going through their physician to get access to their test results.

Most hospitals and ambulatory care centers are focusing their innovation initiatives on cost reduction, according to the results of the 2013 Healthcare Provider Innovation Survey from HIMSS and innovation accelerator AVIA.