With the vast amount of data at its disposal, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the ideal hub for healthcare data mining.

I am a practicing physician with extra responsibility for informatics and innovation. I love being able to do multiple things in my day, but I do often hear “How do you juggle all those roles?”  The simple answer is that I truly treat them as synergistic—they feed and support each other.

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.

The Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC) has accredited the first vendors through the Direct Trust Agent Accreditation Program (DTAAP), which certifies vendors in best practices using Direct Project protocols for interoperable, secure messaging over the internet, Debra Hopkinson, EHNAC operations vice president, confirmed to Clinical Innovation + Technology.

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.