Travis Leonardi .com

CHICAGO – The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) announced Tuesday the launch of new CCHIT Certified programs in three specialty areas for electronic health records.

The new programs focus on Behavioral Health – both as an optional addition to Ambulatory EHR certification and as a standalone Behavioral Health EHR used in other outpatient settings – Dermatology, and Long-Term and Post-Acute Care (which also includes optional add-on certifications for EHRs used in skilled nursing facilities and home health).

by Charlie Cook national journal
Hurricane GOP On The Way!

Imagine sitting in Washington’s Verizon Center, listening blissfully to Carole King and James Taylor, thanks to a fast-thinking friend who managed to score four floor seats. For 50-somethings, it’s a nice place to be. Then, as the concert is winding down, four pages of poll tables of a just-released survey pop up in your BlackBerry. They are jaw-dropping numbers, not inconsistent with what you had been thinking — if anything more a confirmation of it. But the dramatic nature of the numbers brings the real world of politics crashing through what had been a most mellow evening.

The numbers were from the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted June 17-21 among 1,000 adults by pollsters Peter Hart (a Democrat) and Bill McInturff (a Republican). Among the registered voters in the survey, Republicans led by 2 points on the generic congressional ballot test, 45 percent to 43 percent. This may not sound like a lot, given that Democrats now hold 59 percent of House seats. When this same poll was taken in June 2008, however, Democrats led by 19 points, 52 percent to 33 percent.

That drop-off should be enough to sober Democrats up, but the next set of data was even more chilling. First, keep in mind that all registered voters don’t vote even in presidential years, and that in midterm elections the turnout is about one-third less. In an attempt to ascertain who really is most likely to vote, pollsters asked registered voters, on a scale of 1 to 10, how interested they were in the November elections. Those who said either 9 or 10 added up to just over half of the registered voters, coming in at 51 percent.

Hart and McInturff then looked at the change among the most-interested voters from the same survey in 2008. Although 2010 is a “down-shifting” election, from a high-turnout presidential year to a lower-turnout midterm year, one group was more interested in November than it was in 2008: those who had voted for Republican John McCain for president. And the groups that showed the largest decline in interest? Those who voted for Barack Obama — liberals, African-Americans, self-described Democrats, moderates, those living in either the Northeast or West, and younger voters 18 to 34 years of age. These are the “Holy Mackerel” numbers.

Among all voters, there has been a significant swing since 2008 when Democrats took their new majority won in 2006 to an even higher level. But when you home in on those people in this survey who are most likely to vote, the numbers are devastating. The NBC/WSJ survey, when combined with a previously released NPR study of likely voters in 70 competitive House districts by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger, point to an outcome for Democrats that is as serious as a heart attack. Make no mistake about it: There is a wave out there, and for Democrats, the House is, at best, teetering on the edge.

To be sure, things could change in the four months between now and November 2. The GOP’s failure to get Republicans to vote in the May 18 special election in Pennsylvania’s 12th District underscores that the party can’t just sit back and await spontaneous combustion in terms of turnout. Still, the potential is here for a result that is proportional to some of the bigger postwar midterm wave elections. These kinds of waves are often ragged; almost always some candidates who looked dead somehow survive and others who were deemed safe get sucked down in the undertow. That’s the nature of these beasts. But the recent numbers confirm that trends first spotted late last summer have fully developed into at least a Category 3 or 4 hurricane.

Given how many House seats were newly won by Democrats in 2008 in GOP districts, and given that this election is leading into an all-important redistricting year, this reversal of fortune couldn’t have happened at a worse time for Democrats.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama submitted on Monday a $3.8 trillion federal budget request to Congress for fiscal year 2011. The president said he plans to make healthcare reform – and healthcare IT in particular – a major part of his long-term plans to put America back on track financially.

In keeping with the president’s past support of healthcare IT advancement, this year’s fiscal budget request includes $110 million to strengthen healthcare IT policy coordination and research activities.

Last February, the Administration backed more than $20.6 billion over 10 years to advance healthcare IT adoption in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)  Click here

SFC bill appears to be in trouble in its current form.  Despite the fact that CBO has scored it as the cheapest bill to be considered so far there seems to be little support.

Google Health puts ‘living wills’ online July 16, 2009 | Molly Merrill, Associate Editor

ALEXANDRIA, VA – A partnership between Google Health and the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s Caring Connections provides a way to store and access a patient’s advanced directives online.

The “living will” feature on Google Health enables users to download a free, state-specific advance directive and store the scanned documents securely online. Officials say this will help overcome a common barrier in emergency healthcare situations, where it can be difficult to access a patient’s advance directive when the patient is terminally ill and no longer able to communicate. This document provides specific information to healthcare professionals and can help guide family caregivers called upon to make decisions on behalf of that person.

 (6/21, Gaouette, Johnston) reported that the arrangement “shrinks the so-called doughnut hole in Medicare’s prescription-drug program. The companies will discount as much as 50 percent of the cost of brand-name medicines, according to PhRMA, the Washington- based industry trade group that represents such drugmakers.” Click here