Top 5 Government Health IT Stories Of The Summer

Call it the season of interoperability. That was the biggest topic of the summer among Government Health IT readers.  Popular nuances of interoperability included avoiding pitfalls, sustainable HIE, the matter of how well Epic plays with other EHRs, and a look at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s 10 year plan to achieve interoperability.

Dubois Regional Medical Center CIO Tom Johnson put it in perspective during an ONC meeting in early July. “Interoperability will take 10 years which, interestingly enough, is how long it took us to put somebody on the moon.”  Interoperability, of course, is an underlying tenet of just about all aspects of health IT these days — and that includes the massive Defense Department modernization undertaking, of which Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM’s global public sector unit, answered inquiries about Epic, and the potential to pull Apple into their bid...