David Blumenthal, MD, will step down as the National Coordinator for Health IT later this spring to return to his academic post at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., according to a memo from Kathleen Sebelius, which was obtained by this publication.

The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) face barriers in three IT management areas--strategic planning, enterprise architecture and investment management. As a result, the organizations lack mechanisms for identifying and implementing IT solutions to address their common healthcare system needs, according to a February report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Cloud computing service company eMix has formed an alliance with VMware.

Hospital usage of surgery management products has matured past basic charting and scheduling functionalities--which are currently nearing 90 percent adoption--to include more advanced tools, according to a new report from KLAS.

The U.S. Senate voted 51 to 47 Wednesday to reject a Republican-sponsored bill to repeal the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (PPACA) enacted in 2010.

Providers and public health agencies in Minnesota and Rhode Island began exchanging health information using specifications developed by the Direct Project initiative, according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).The pilot demonstrations were launched less than a year after the inception of the Direct Project, a public-private partnership to develop web-based tools for transmitting patient data via electronic health information exchange (HIE), ONC officials stated during a press conference Feb. 1.

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) has announced its 2010 Clinician IT Leadership award winners. Liz Johnson, RN-C, has won the HIMSS Nursing Informatics Leadership Award, and Michael H. Zaroukian, MD, PhD, has received the HIMSS Physician IT Leadership Award.

For our second annual CMIO Compensation Survey, we honed our questions and answers based on some of last years responses, focusing on salary and bonus information, workload and key demographics. The results: 40 percent more responses and some interesting changes from a year ago.