Physician leaders view online physician ratings as inaccurate, unreliable and not widely used among patients, according to the results of a survey conducted by the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE), which found that physicians much prefer internal organizational ratings based on actual performance, as opposed to the consumer websites that many physicians consider to be nothing more than “popularity contests.”

Health IT and big data have the potential to revolutionize clinical research and, at the Columbia University Medical Center, the implementation of a centralized research data repository helped researchers produce more studies with more value, according to a case report published online Jan. 15 by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

A recent webinar and journal article argue that interoperability is the victim of products offered by vendors, sluggish EHR adoption and poor health IT system design.

On January 1, Alliance Healthcare Solutions and Final Support merged to form Quatris Health, the largest privately held company authorized to sell and support GE Healthcare’s Centricity Practice Solution.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will award up to $400 million annually under its new Healthcare Connect Fund to accelerate development of broadband networks supporting rural telemedicine and access to health records.

Through a three-year study, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) hopes to evaluate the efficacy of its mobile health smoking cessation initiative, SmokefreeTXT, according to a notice in the Jan. 14 Federal Register.

Mark D. Smith, MD, MBA, who has led the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) since its founding in 1996, plans to step down as president and CEO at the end of year.

As penalties for too many readmissions loom over hospitals, it is clear that many have not done enough to stave off Medicare payment reductions and that coordinated care efforts may require more interoperable tools to achieve results, according to Dominick Bizzarro, RPh, who spoke during a Jan. 10 webinar hosted by the Health Information Management and Systems Society.