ONC

By  Aditi Pai 09:01 am June 4, 2014
The Department of Health and Human Service's Idea Lab and the Office of the National Coordinator have partnered with San Diego-based Total Communicator Solutions to develop the Idea Lab's workplace wellness initiative, called Project Boundary. Project Boundary partnered with Total Communicator Solutions for its Spark Compass platform, which sends notifications to users based on geofences and...
By  Jonah Comstock 08:09 am April 15, 2014
Blood pressure centiles, a SMART app. The SMART platform (Substitutable Medical Apps and Reusable Technology), an ONC-funded, Boston Children's Hospital-led effort to encourage the development of modular apps for EHRs, has announced an advisory committee to help support the growth of the platform. The committee includes representatives from The Advisory Board Company, AARP, BMJ, Canadian...
By  Jonah Comstock 11:19 am April 4, 2014
The FDA, along with the FCC and ONC has finally released the report to Congress required by the FDA Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA) of 2012. This FDASIA report, called "Proposed Strategy and Recommendations for a Risk-Based Framework," reiterates previously articulated FDA positions on regulatory discretion and avoiding regulatory redundancy between the FDA, ONC, and FDA. It's based on the...
By  Jonah Comstock 05:37 am March 26, 2014
This time last year, the Gary and Mary West Health Institute released a report calculating that medical device interoperability (via the adoption of open standards) could save the healthcare system about $36 billion. Now the Institute has teamed up with federal government groups and released a new whitepaper, based on an event held last month, detailing how interoperability -- and those savings...
By  Brian Dolan 10:56 am March 21, 2014
By Brian Dolan Four years ago a keynote speaker at the American Medical Informatics Association meeting in Washington D.C. made a provocative prediction about the near-future importance of patient generated health data: "I think it's not that bold to say that in five years the kind of things I was showing you are going to put us in a position where the vast majority of information that a doctor...
By  Brian Dolan 07:17 am February 21, 2014
Without a doubt patient engagement is one of the more important trends in healthcare and health IT right now. Over the past few years the tools that look to enable patient engagement between providers and patients have changed markedly. It is important to note, however, that the tools themselves are just a small part of the story -- they can go a long way toward improving patient engagement,...
By  Neil Versel 04:33 am January 15, 2014
The US Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT is slowing its rollout launch of a website meant to encourage patients to take a more active role in their own care. ONC will wait until verifying that all the data on Blue Button Connector, a planned hub for consumers to find sources of health data to download as well as Blue Button Plus technology to facilitate it, is accurate,...
By  Jonah Comstock 11:11 am December 4, 2013
WellDoc's technology has previously been integrated with a hospital's EHR during a pilot. Eight healthcare and technology industry groups have sent a letter to the Health IT Policy Committee (HITPC), in the Department of Health and Human Services, asking that Meaningful Use Stage 3 guidelines include a requirement that electronic health records make use of patient generated data from remote...
By  Brian Dolan 05:18 am November 21, 2013
Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-PA) This week the US House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on Health held a hearing to discuss the "Federal Regulation of Mobile Medical Apps and Other Health Software", which ended up being a partial re-run of the committee's FDA-apps hearings back in March. This time around, however, the committee stacked the witness table with supporters...
By  Jonah Comstock 07:04 am November 6, 2013
In one of his first public appearances after stepping down from the ONC, former National Coordinator Dr. Farzad Mostashari didn't talk much about his future plans. But, speaking at the Digital Health Innovation Summit in Boston, he did give his perspective on a number of issues in healthcare and healthcare technology. Mostashari told interviewer Thomas Goetz, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation...