The kids are eager for school to end and summer break to begin, the plants and flowers are blooming and it seems the healthcare industry is in flux as well. While 2013 is supposed to be the year of implementation, it seems it is the year of protest and debate about Meaningful Use (MU) instead.

As the three-year $250 million Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program embarks on its final year, the 17 participating communities are sharing lessons learned on their work to harness health IT and develop innovative approaches to healthcare delivery.

The American Hospital Association (AHA) officially weighed in on six Republican senators' April report that called for a “reboot” of Meaningful Use, agreeing with the legislators’ concerns about interoperability, privacy and security and the financial burden of the EHR incentive program but advised against putting the brakes on it entirely.

SAN FRANCISCO -- CareCloud, a leading provider of cloud-based practice management, electronic health records (EHR), and medical billing software and services, and QuantiaMD, the largest social learning and collaboration platform serving more than 170,000 validated physician members, today announced the findings of the first Practice Profitability Index (PPI). The announcement took place at the inaugural HealthBeat 2013 Conference, sponsored by VentureBeat in San Francisco. The PPI was created and launched as part of a partnership between the two companies and was designed to provide a voice to US physician practices regarding issues impacting the financial and operational health of their practices.

The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) has created the WEDI ICD-10 State Collaborative Initiative aimed to bring together state collaborative organizations and their members to increase efficiencies and reduce the significant time and costs associated with ICD-10 compliance.

Universal healthcare coverage stood out as a major theme in Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ speech at the World Health Assembly plenary session in Geneva, Switzerland on May 20.

The House Appropriations Committee approved an initial $73.3 billion fiscal year 2014 military and veterans appropriations bill that contains $344 million to “jumpstart” a single, integrated Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) EHR system (iEHR).

It was another busy week in the health IT arena but, I think the biggest news is the fact that Marilyn Tavenner was finally confirmed as head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). This marks the first time CMS has an official leader since 2006.