[View the story "HIMSS12 Twitter recap: The untethered doctor" on Storify]

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With the Stage 2 meaningful use proposed rule still waiting in the wings, the certification team from ONC addressed HIMSS12 attendees Wednesday morning, delivering details on the agency’s efforts to move toward a permanent certification program for EHRs.

Steven Posnack, director of ONC’s Federal Policy Division, was notably absent from the presentation, presumably occupied with shaping the Stage 2 proposed rule into releasable form.

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On May 22nd at 5:41pm local time, an EF5 tornado – with 200 mph winds, six miles long, one mile wide – hit the town of Joplin, Missouri, with St. John’s Regional Medical Center in its path.

There were many heroes that day and in the aftermath. What mitigated the disaster’s impact and aided the recovery was the $800 million decade-long initiative of building an IT infrastructure and implementing an electronic health record (EHR), along with solid leadership, at Mercy Health, an integrated health system that included St. John’s.

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While there has been much talk in healthcare about using information technology on the clinical end to build an interoperable industry, the financial side of healthcare has been given short shrift.

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Officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are expected to present Thursday the notice of proposed rulemaking on meaningful use Stage 2 of the federal incentive plan for adopting electronic health records.

The new proposal for Stage 2 of the meaningful use of electronic health records would require healthcare entities to focus more on interoperability – to move from testing to doing actual exchange.

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Stage 1 meaningful use will be extended to 2014, and Stage 2 proposed rules – soon to be published on the ONC site and in the Federal Register – get bullish on interoperability.

Those two messages from ONC chief Farzad Mostashari, MD, drew applause from an overflow crowd at a HIMSS12 session on meaningful use Wednesday, The session had been billed as a ‘sneak peak’ of the proposed rules for Stage 2. Mostashari promised a “deeper dive,” at Thursday sessions.

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Expectations have been rising since HIMSS12 opened, but the wait should come to an end today as ONC officials unveil the proposed rule for meaningful use Stage 2 - what some are calling a "sneak peek."

ONC director Farzad Mostashari, MD, is scheduled to join other ONC and CMS officials to introduce the much-anticipated rule.

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With the landscape of healthcare changing, IT departments are finding themselves as busy as ever.

And with the stress of mandates and new technologies also come the risk of staff burnout, dissatisfaction, and even the loss of human resources. 

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Lack of staffing resources was cited as the most significant barrier to implementing IT, according to the 2012 HIMSS Leadership Survey, which was released Tuesday morning at HIMSS12.

Nearly two-thirds of the 302 IT executive level respondents expect to add staff in the next year to successfully implement their IT initiatives.

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"We have a good shot at really moving at an exponential pace over the next five to 10 years, to really get to where we want to go," said Janet Corrigan, president and CEO of the National Quality Forum, speaking to a packed house in the auditorium-sized Venetian Showroom on Tuesday morning.

Key to effecting that "logarithmic" change across healthcare? The use of standardized performance measures – for which "health information technology is essential," she said.

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Fred Rachman, MD, CEO of the Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services, prompted the group of physicians and technologists in the room to start thinking about what a successful healthcare system might look like. That was his role Tuesday at a session called “Realizing the Value of Investments Resulting in Health Care Reform: Or Can We?”

New at HIMSS12, the session was one of nine and a VIP breakfast that stem from the new HIMSS Leaders & Innovators program, a year-round initiative of events, community, networking, and research.

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In a session so crowded that conference officials closed the doors and effectively locked attendees out, Military Health System acting CIO Karen Guice, MD, offered a glimpse of the future of MHS health IT.

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The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) has called on the Department of Health and Human Services to “quickly and decisively” set a compliance date for ICD-10.

In a Tuesday letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, CHIME strongly urged Sebelius to forego a prolonged uncertainty about the timing and details of a new ICD-10 compliance date, which would move the deadline for compliance past the current Oct. 1, 2013 date.

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Michael Buck, PhD, just might be the poster boy for Query Health.

ONC’s distributed querying initiative is gearing up to enable physicians and public health officials to ask simple questions against complex and diverse systems spanning geographic regions to get real-time health data in return – and to do so without building the sort of mammoth data warehouse IBM or Oracle would showcase.

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[View the story "Twitter Recap: Biz Stone Keynote" on Storify]

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[View the story "Twitter recap: Eric Dishman on 'global aging'" on Storify]

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The National Quality Forum (NQF) has announced its endorsement of 12 new quality measures for palliative and end-of-life care.

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 The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) have introduced a free online tool, the ICD-10 Critical Pathway for Getting Started – 2012 and Beyond for use by providers who have not yet begun preparing for ICD-10. 

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The economy might not be filling everyone's wallets these days, but the landscape for venture capital firms looking to invest in healthcare has never been hotter.

So said Neil W. Borg, managing director of BC Ziegler, one of the oldest healthcare-directed VC firms, at the start of Monday's Health IT Venture Fair & Strategic Partner Forum.

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"This is a bit ironic today," Sue Bowman said, pointing to a CMS-borrowed slide stating that the compliance deadline for ICD-10 is October 1, 2013. "The government threw a big curveball toward many presentations."

Speaking at the HIMSS12 ICD-10 Symposium on Monday morning, AHIMA's director of coding policy and compliance Bowman urged attendees that, even though we do not know when the compliance date will be, it's best to "stay on course, stay vigilant," in your ICD-10 planning and implementation.

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