The creation of the ONC’s new Office of Consumer Health is “exciting because it signals a real commitment on the part of ONC to engage consumers,” said acting director Lygeia Riccardi. While the office works closely with other ONC programs, the “walls are permeable,” Riccardi said, because the office also works with other agencies and the private sector. “We view our role as being conveners and catalysts. We are fueled by a combination of policy, changes in healthcare and the way technology has become a big part of our everyday existence.”

Mobile health brings a revolution to healthcare, said Joseph C. Kvedar, MD, director of the Center for Connected Health in Boston, speaking during a Dec. 14 webinar presented by the Health Information Management and Systems Society.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovations awarded Mayo Clinic, Philips and the United States Critical Illness and Injury Trials Group more than $16 million to investigate how cloud-based technology can improve care delivered to Medicare beneficiaries in intensive care units.

The imbalance in Medicare is going to continue to grow, said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) at the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT’s annual meeting on Dec. 14, referring to the discrepancy between what individuals pay in to the system compared with the value of the services they receive. “The question is going to be whether we have the personal and political will to take this enormously powerful tool of health IT and allow it to be transformative.”

While mobile devices have the potential to allow providers access to valuable tools wherever they go, organizations are still determining best practices for securing mobile devices, according to a Dec. 13 presentation at the Privacy & Security Forum hosted by the Health Information and Management Systems Society and Healthcare IT News.

Prior to participating in the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT's (ONC) annual meeting, John D. Halamka, MD, MS, health IT guru and CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, blogged that interoperability will dramatically increase by 2014.

Healthcare technology management (HTM) professionals working in hospitals said their top challenge is the management of medical devices and systems on IT networks, according to a survey commissioned by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI).

Healthcare consumers considering a physician at University of Utah Health Care now have online access to the system’s patient satisfaction scores and comments. The rankings are based on more than 40,000 patient surveys and evaluate physicians on nine questions.