Health IT Focus Shifts To States:
HHS Awards AHIMA Foundation $1.2 Million for
State-Level Health Information Exchange Consensus Project
American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) announced Sept. 1, 2009, that the Office of the National Health Coordinator (ONC) has awarded the AHIMA Foundation $1.2 million for one year “to continue the State-level Health Information Exchange (SL-HIE) Consensus Project to actively assist states with nationwide health information exchange (HIE) adoption, planning and implementation.” “This project has been sponsored by ONC and managed by the AHIMA Foundation since 2006.”
Modern Healthcare’s HITS summary reported by Jessica Zigmond on Sept. 1, 2009.
SL-HIE Web site: http://www.slhie.org
New report pegs state, local government market for health IT at $9.6B by 2014
Healthcare IT News’s Bernie Monegain reported on August 28, 2009, ”Market research firm INPUT estimates that state and local government health organizations will increase their purchases of healthcare information technology from $7.6 billion in 2009 to $9.6 billion in 2014…” with electronic health records at public hospitals and health organizations being the key expense. Additional details are also available from INPUT, author of the report Health IT Transformation: FY2009-FY2014 State and Local Market Forecast.
More than 50% of state CIOs working on HIT: NASCIO report
Joseph Conn, HITS writer for Modern Healthcare, wrote on August 24, 2009, “Another indication that states—and not regions—may be the cornerstones of health information exchange is that so many state information technology officers are already involved in building exchanges within their jurisdictions, according to a professional association of state government IT officials.”
FederalComputerWeek’s Alice Lipowicz reported August 25, 2009, on “How state CIOs can help with Health IT.”
The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) report is called “Profiles of Progress III: State Health IT Initiatives.
NASCIO National Research Brief –August 2009 (pdf).
CMS Divulges Medicaid Health IT Plans at the 2009 MMIS Conference
On August 24, 2009, Kristine Mullhollan on INPUT’s Blog B2G Breaking Views reported “Denise Bazemore, a Project Officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), provided insights and details on the upcoming state Medicaid directors’ letter addressing how to proceed with HITECH,” focusing on planning activities and the need to separate different pools of money for MMIS and Medicaid Health IT Advanced Planning Documents.
See August 7, 2009 post “State Experts Issue Recommendations for Implementing Electronic Health Information Exchange” for latest from State Alliance for e-Health.
