The Medical Informatics World Conference was a great source of knowledge from the field and those who have put analytics at the top of their IT priority list.

After a controversy of excessive wait times and IT struggles at the Department of Veterans Affairs spurred the resignation of Eric Shinseki, the White House now is considering a high profile hospital executive from Cleveland Clinic to take over the beleaguered agency, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has made available the annual update of the 2014 electronic clinical quality measures for eligible professionals and corresponding specifications for electronic reporting.

Providers, suppliers, billing companies and clearinghouses should delay acknowledgement testing for ICD-10 until after Oct. 6, 2014, when Medicare is expected to update its system, according to a notice from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Niall Brennan, acting director, CMS Offices of Enterprise Management.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is moving forward with restructuring as HITECH’s health IT infrastructure and program investments draw to a close.

In conjunction with the Health Datapalooza annual conference this week in Washington, D.C., the Department of Health and Human Services has released new data and tools tailored to increase transparency.

According to the OIG’s review of a random sample of 657 evaluation and management (E/M) Medicare claims from 2010, more than half (55 percent) had coding and/or documentation errors. Of these, vastly more were upcoded rather than downcoded. If the sample’s findings hold true for all Medicare E/M claims, it means the government is probably overpaying for E/M services by around $6.7 billion, the OIG concluded.

EHR 2.0 is the idea that once certified EHR technology is implemented, a healthcare delivery organization can begin to reap the kind of knowledge and actionable information from its vast stores of data that bend the cost curve and make a real impact on patient outcomes.