Two major changes have been announced for the Office of National Coordinator’s (ONC) Health IT Certification Program with the aim of reducing burden for IT vendors and providers using their products.

Medicare spending could be reduced by $3.1 billion annually through enhanced care coordination and effective population health management from a nationwide, integrated health information exchange (HIE).

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.