Seventy-one percent of physicians believe the promise of reduced costs resulting from increased use of health IT is inflated and that HIT will actually end up costing more, according to an insights paper released by Deloitte.

Electronic health record adoption is on the rise. The number of hospitals using basic EHR systems tripled from 12.2 percent in 2009 to 44.4 percent in 2012, according to a report released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and CMS.  However, the move towards efficient care coordination and care delivery through health IT does not end with EHR adoption alone. Clinical information needs to be able to flow seamlessly between EHR products within one health network and among different networks. Various healthcare industry sectors and software vendors are, therefore, focusing on advancing the interoperability of health IT systems.  

The National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Farzad Mostashari, announced that the "Governance Framework for Trusted Electronic Health Information Exchange" has been released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.

Carolina Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Center in Gastonia, N.C., has received a Circle of Excellence Award in the practice management system category from Chapel Hill, N.C.-based TSI Healthcare, a provider of customized health IT solutions.

Carolina Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Center in Gastonia, N.C., has received a Circle of Excellence Award in the practice management system category from Chapel Hill, N.C.-based TSI Healthcare, a provider of customized health IT solutions.

HHS and Federal Communications Commission have selected members for a new workgroup that will promote innovation in health information technology, including mobile medical applications, and identify ways to improve patient safety through health IT.

Health organizations are using technology to implement programs that help improve quality of patient care, according to an infographic based on a survey called "Healthcare Insights 2012," by Emdeon, a provider of revenue and payment cycle management and clinical information exchange solutions.

In recent years, many hospitals and health systems have been affected by a data breach. According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, 94 percent of organizations surveyed experienced at least one data breach in the previous two years. Forty-five percent of organizations experienced more than five data breaches in the past two years.

In and around the healthcare industry there has been a lot of talk about "big data" — very large sets of complex data that become difficult to process using database management tools. Big data is emerging in the industry because hospitals and health systems are collecting large amounts of data on patients every single day. The data comes for a variety of settings — clinical, billing, scheduling and so on. Unfortunately, in the past, a lot of that data was not leveraged to make patient care and hospital operations better. Recently though, there has been a shift to change that.

The risk of a data breach to hospitals and health systems is on the rise, and has been for some time, evidenced in the frequency of data breach reports as well as numerous studies covering the healthcare industry's high susceptibility.