The use of at-home medical devices to connect doctors and patients via the internet can help patients and their physicians work more efficiently together to manage chronic conditions, according to research at Cleveland Clinic.

To enable widespread health IT use across the U.S., we need fairness among the types of resources physicians can receive via stimulus money, help for outpatient care not covered by the HITECH Act and a fair benchmark for achieving meaningful use (other than 100 percent), according to Michael Zaroukian, MD, PhD, CMIO and associate professor of medicine, Michigan State University.

Patient monitoring technology is evolving to deliver far more than digital vital signs. Todays physiological monitoring systems provide immediacy, accuracy and ease of access with an added dimension of both intelligenceto predict, monitor and analyze patient events over timeand flexibility to monitor patients from other areas in the unit and even the patients home.

ATLANTA -- The government doesnt want to be in the software business, said Vish Sankaran, Federal Healthcare Architecture (FHA) program director at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. Sankaran described the FHAs work on CONNECT in an interview with CMIO.

ATLANTAIn order to achieve true interoperability within a healthcare system, the IT leaders must consider the value of leaving physicians in the comfort zone, as well as adopting a patient-centric model, to which all data is anchored, according to a session Tuesday at HIMSS10.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has charged Guidant, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boston Scientific, with covering-up device failure problems associated with its Ventak Prizm 2 DR and Contak Renewal implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICD).

ATLANTAIf providers are able to overcome organizational improvement imperatives, as well as some technological considerations, clinical decision support (CDS) systems can facilitate the adherence to challenging quality achievements, according to Jerome A. Osheroff, MD, chief clinical informatics officer at Thomson Reuters, who hosted a CDS discussion at HIMSS10 today.

The readiness of healthcare to deploy EHRs and EMRs, supported by ARRA and the HITECH Act, is not where it needs to be, especially in small physician practices, according to William Bria, III, MD, president of the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) and CMIO at Shriners Hospital for Children in Tampa. The role of the CMIO is key to managing the process design necessary to implement and integrate EHRs and EMRs in order to attain meaningful useand making sure balance exists between technology and the medical staffs ability to absorb it. Please view the CMIO interview, which took place at the HIMSS10 conference this week.