NHS Connecting for Health, the agency in charge of England's National Program for IT in the NHS, has terminated its $1.77 billion contract with Fujitsu Services. The London-based Fujitsu has been in negotiations to "reset" its contract with the NHS to deliver IT systems to hospitals for more than a year. Despite earlier indications that progress was being made to resolve the differences between the two parties, NHS/CFH reported that they had failed to reach an agreement.
The State of Arizona's Government Information Technology Agency has selected consulting firm Mosaica Partners to guide a statewide development of rural regional health information organizations. Arizona is offering to rural communities planning grants totaling $800,000 for three to seven awards. Each award will fund nine months of planning and capability building, and other early activities of forming a RHIO.
A provision of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requiring healthcare providers to submit a National Provider Identifier for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement went into effect May 23. Early reports indicate that the impact of the NPI deployment has resulted in nearly one-quarter of submitted claims being rejected since that date. Hospitals, physicians, clinics, and labs that fail to submit an NPI for Medicare claims for services after May 23 will have their claims returned as unprocessable, according to CMS.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh are training a computer to decode the human mind. Their computer program can read a person's brain scan and figure out what noun he or she is thinking. The goal is to perfect the program so that it can help autistic, schizophrenic or paralyzed people. The work expands on a separate study the same scientists published showing that people's brains activate similarly when they think about the same word.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has announced it will give a dozen research teams up to $200,000 each for projects that will measure the effects of playing video games on the young and old. For example, researchers at Cornell University will study how a mobile phone game rewarding healthy eating and exercise will influence children's behavior, and researchers at the University of Florida will monitor how playing Playstation 2's "Crazy Taxi" affects perception in the elderly.
Earlier this year, some leading chief information officers gathered for an event that was touted by its sponsor, IT vendor Picis, as "Forward Thinking CIOs Debate Hot Issues Facing Hospitals in 2008." However, there was actually little debate—the panelists quickly reached consensus on any number of issues. They represented a diverse group of facilities, yet struck on multiple common themes.
The event showed the modern hospital CIO role as one requiring equal planting in operations and strategy. Representing San Diego-based Sharp HealthCare, Bill Spooner observed that demonstrating value to expensive IT systems would be one of his most pressing challenges in the near future. "We ought to take it as a personal challenge," he said. In the next breath, Spooner went on to note that the industry will be challenged by a new president and must cope with the growth of consumer-driven care. "If healthcare continues to consume more and more of our GDP, and our costs continue to go up, having consumers in charge of healthcare is not going to be wonderful for us."
Later, the discussion turned to the topic of system interoperability, the very cornerstone of deriving value from IT. Again, Spooner led the charge, expressing dismay that few vendors have adopted the continuity of care standard from HL7. Fellow panelist Richard McKnight, representing North Carolina-based Novant Health, echoed Spooner. "If somebody out there gets it right, we will probably crush them with new business because that is exactly what we are looking for." McKnight noted that although individual buyers lack adequate clout to compel IT vendors to adopt common standards, CIO user groups, acting collectively, could drive change. "If we continue to talk about it individually, it will take a much, much longer time, and the result will be less satisfactory."
Do I hear a call for government action in the making? Well, to be realistic, it's a long way from a CIO panel to Washington, DC. A more likely scenario might be that IT vendors listen up and act on the concerns of their customers. But even that scenario, as Spooner noted, is taking time to play out. Of course, the prospects of the "crush of new business" might get some attention in the software vendor corporate suites. Consensus has a way of making itself known.
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