CMS has released the design of the new Medicare cards which beneficiaries will begin to receive next year, containing a randomly assigned number to replace the current one based off a patient’s Social Security number.

In an interview posted by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Andrew Gettinger, MD, the chief medical information officer for the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), said he believes there are more electronic health record-related safety problems then recent studies have found.

Healthcare simulation is rapidly changing the face of healthcare. Simulation is a technique that creates a situation or environment allowing people to experience a representation of a real event for the purpose of experiential practice, learning, testing, evaluation and understanding of systems. The inaugural Healthcare Simulation Week will be held September 11-15, 2017.

IBM’s artificial intelligence platform Watson was touted as a revolutionary tool for diagnosing and treating cancer. So far, Watson for Oncology has failed to deliver on those claims, struggling to learn about different types of cancer and only making recommendations based on training by its human operators, not its own insights.

The 2009 HITECH Act was conceived, in part, when paper medical records were destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. The electronic health records and technology implemented since did their job in Houston as the city endured massive flooding due to Hurricane Harvey.

Though most hospitals, even in rural areas, have now adopted electronic health records (EHRs), a “digital divide” is growing between larger hospitals and critical access facilities in rural areas.

Kaiser Permanente is being fined $2.2 million by the state of California for not submitting data on patient care to Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

Doctors, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals are heading back to school at Cedars-Sinai, joining the first class of a new, accredited master’s degree program in health delivery science, offering an advanced curriculum focused on measuring and improving the value of healthcare.