The Senate has approved a bill that excludes patient encounters at ambulatory surgical centers from the Meaningful Use program.

“We want to do more than just adjust to a suboptimum system,” said Gordon D. Schiff, MD, associate director of the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

A new bill from the House of Representatives would prevent the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) from writing the Meaningful Use Stage 3 rules until at least 2017. 

The big news in health IT this week was the announcement that Cerner won the Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) contract along with partners Leidos and Accenture.

At long last, the winning vendors for the Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) procurement effort have been named and they are Cerner, Leidos and Accenture. The group surprisingly beat out bids headed up by Allscripts and Epic.  

To the great relief of many who have called for a pause on the federal Meaningful Use program, the Senate Health Education Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee announced today it will ask the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to delay Stage 3.  

Pulse Systems, Inc., an industry-leading provider of Electronic Health Record (EHR), Practice Management, e-prescribing, Billing and Collections, and other Revenue Cycle Management solutions, recently updated its Complete EHR as part of its comprehensive plan to prepare for the transition to ICD-10 on Oct. 1, 2015.

The American Medical Association held a town hall meeting that aimed to gather physician feedback on why the Meaningful Use program should be postponed.