Archive for July, 2010
Author: (Health and Human Services Department Documents and Publications/ContentWorks via COMTEX) — SUMMARY: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is issuing this final rule to complete the adoption of an initial set of standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria, and to more closely align such standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria with final meaningful use Stage 1 objectives and measures. Adopted certification criteria establish the required capabilities and specify the related standards and implementation specifications that certified electronic health record (EHR) technology will need to include to, at a minimum, support the achievement of meaningful use Stage 1 by eligible professionals, eligible hospitals, and/or critical access hospitals (hereafter, references to “eligible hospitals” in this final rule shall mean “eligible hospitals and/or critical access hospitals”) under the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs. Complete EHRs and EHR Modules will be tested and certified according to adopted certification criteria to ensure that they have properly implemented adopted standards and implementation specifications and otherwise comply with the adopted certification criteria.
DATES: Effective Date: This final rule is effective August 27, 2010. The incorporation by reference of certain publications listed in the rule is approved by the Director of the Federal Register as of August 27, 2010.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Steven Posnack, Director, Federal Policy Division, Office of Policy and Planning, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, 202-690-7151.
News posted by Virtual Global:
Virtual Global, a West Virginia corporation, is a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions, including the TeamHost™ cloud platform for creating and deploying SaaS systems without programming; HealthCapsule™, a toolkit for creating secure Health IT solutions; TeamLeader™, a project management 2.0 software for tracking and reporting on virtual teams in real-time; and cloudipedia.com, a website that brings cloud computing information to the masses. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s platform technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs.
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By TOM SPOTH | Last Updated: July 27, 2010
Google’s package of cloud-computing applications is the first to be certified by the General Services Administration as meeting federal cybersecurity standards, the company announced Monday.
Google Apps — which includes well-known programs such as Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar — was approved by GSA chief information officer Casey Coleman last week under the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).
The certification only covers the use of Google Apps within GSA, but Google officials believe it gives the company a leg up in the race to move federal networks at other agencies into the cloud.
“We see this really as a green light for agencies to move forward with cloud computing,” David Mihalchik, head of business development for Google’s federal team, said Tuesday in an interview. “Given the leadership role GSA plays … we fully expect that other agencies will leverage this certification.”
GSA is heading up the Obama administration’s cloud-computing initiative, and last month it asked contractors for proposals to move GSA’s e-mail systems and other applications into the cloud.
Google’s certification is “something other agencies could look to, but not that they could use,” GSA spokeswoman Sahar Wali said. Specifically, other agencies could adopt the language used in GSA’s certification of Google, but they would still have to conduct their own negotiations with the company and prepare their own certification documents, Wali said.
Other companies, including Google rival Microsoft, have requested FISMA certification from GSA and are still going through the process.
This fall, GSA plans to set up a program called Fedramp that will speed adoption of cloud computing by allowing agencies to piggyback on each other’s cloud-related FISMA certifications. Existing certifications would give companies a head start once Fedramp is up and running.
The administration advocates cloud computing as a way to save money, improve performance and free up resources. Employees at agencies that move to a solution such as Google Apps would access their e-mail, calendars, address books and files such as spreadsheets and presentations via the Internet, rather than an application loaded on their hard drives.
Security has been a primary concern for federal department heads and chief information officers as they mull the transition to the cloud. To help alleviate those fears, Google will store government customers’ data in a system located in the continental United States and keep it separate from other Google customers’ information.
“Most agencies we have worked with have found that Google Apps provides at least equivalent, if not better, security than they have today,” Kripa Krishnan, technical program manager for Google Apps for Government, wrote in a blog post Monday.
Google Apps is already in use by more than a dozen federal agencies, but only for small projects that did not require FISMA certification, Mihalchik said.
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News posted by Virtual Global:
Virtual Global, a West Virginia corporation, is a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions, including the TeamHost™ cloud platform for creating and deploying SaaS systems without programming; HealthCapsule™, a toolkit for creating secure Health IT solutions; TeamLeader™, a project management 2.0 software for tracking and reporting on virtual teams in real-time; and cloudipedia.com, a website that brings cloud computing information to the masses. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s platform technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs.
By Stephen Cass : Technology Review
According to its advocates, cloud computing is poised to succeed where so many other attempts to deliver on-demand computing to anyone with a network connection have failed. Some skepticism is warranted. The history of the computer industry is littered with the remains of previous aspirants to this holy grail, from the time-sharing utilities envisioned in the 1960s and 1970s to the network computers of the 1990s (simple computers acting as graphical clients for software running on central servers) to the commercial grid systems of more recent years (aimed at turning clusters of servers into high-performance computers). But cloud computing draws strength from forces that could propel it beyond the ranks of the also-rans.
Rather than running software on dedicated hardware–a mail server here, a database host there–cloud systems can let software run on virtual machines, simulated systems generated at a moment’s notice in massive data centers (see “Water-Powered Computers“). If a customer’s needs expand, more virtual machines can be created and configured with ease, and should those needs later decline, the underlying hardware resources are returned to the data center’s pool.
No elaborate construction or development program is needed to kick-start such technology–the infrastructure is already in place and making money. Existing data centers, built to support the likes of Amazon and Google, can rent spare capacity, creating a collection of services that provide the illusion of infinite computing power and storage on tap. Technologies like virtualization (as explained in “Conjuring Clouds“), combined with growing market pressures to reduce capital spending (see “Virtual Computers, Real Money“), could revolutionize the software industry, enabling startups to offer online applications or services without investing much in storage, Web, or e-commerce infrastructure. End users could have seamless access to applications and data anywhere, on any device.
As reported in “Making Art Pay“, eliminating the need for infrastructure investment allows rapid development of applications. An ecosystem of startups has sprung up to provide platforms, tools, and expertise–recently joined by companies such as IBM and Intel (see “Companies to Watch“). As a still-maturing technology, however, cloud computing has yet to overcome certain challenges, such as guaranteeing the integrity and security of users’ data, providing a seamless user experience, and establishing standards to allow companies to move from provider to provider (see “The Standards Question“). A number of key players are driving many of the industry’s responses to these challenges, and open-source efforts and academic research consortiums are likely to play a role as well (see “Open-Source Projects and Research Consortiums“).
A survey of corporate software buyers by the 451 Group showed the use of public cloud computing increasing by more than 60 percent in the last quarter of 2008 over the previous two quarters, and International Data Corporation has predicted that business IT spending on cloud services will rise from $16 billion last year to $42 billion by 2012, setting up cloud computing as one of the few areas of growth in an otherwise gloomy economy.
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Virtual Global, a West Virginia corporation, is a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions, including the TeamHost™ cloud platform for creating and deploying SaaS systems without programming; HealthCapsule™, a toolkit for creating secure Health IT solutions; TeamLeader™, a project management 2.0 software for tracking and reporting on virtual teams in real-time; and cloudipedia.com, a website that brings cloud computing information to the masses. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s platform technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs.
For Immediate Release: July 21, 2010 Contact: Evelyn Brown
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued draft recommendations for securely configuring and using full virtualization technologies, which, by means of software, duplicate a computer’s operating system and its applications on other machines.
Because it helps maximize the use and flexibility of computing resources—multiple operating systems can run simultaneously on the same hardware—full virtualization is considered a key technology for cloud computing, but it introduces new issues for IT security.
The proposed security recommendations are contained in the draft document, NIST Special Publication 800-125, Guide to Security for Full Virtualization Technologies. NIST is requesting public review of the new draft computer security publication and soliciting comments until August 13.
For cloud computing systems in particular, full virtualization can increase operational efficiency because it can optimize computer workloads and adjust the number of servers in use to match demand, thereby conserving energy and information technology resources. The guide describes security concerns associated with full virtualization technologies for server and desktop virtualization and provides recommendations for addressing these concerns.
Karen Scarfone, the publication’s primary author, says that most existing recommended security practices also apply in virtual environments.
“The practices described in this document build on and assume the implementation of practices described in other NIST computer security publications,” Scarfone says.
The guide is intended for system administrators, security program managers, security engineers and anyone else involved in designing, deploying or maintaining full virtualization technologies. In the draft, NIST recommends for organizations to:
- Secure all elements of a full virtualization solution and maintain their security;
- Restrict and protect administrator access to the virtualization solution;
- Ensure that the hypervisor, the central program that runs the virtual environment, is properly secured; and
- Carefully plan the security for a full virtualization solution before installing, configuring and deploying it.
The draft of NIST Special Publication 800-125, Guide to Security for Full Virtualization Technologies may be obtained from the NIST Computer Security Resource Center at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsDrafts.html. Submit comments to 800-125comments@nist.gov with “Comments SP 800-125″ in the subject line.
Related News: Portal to aid in development of standards is coming soon
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Virtual Global, a West Virginia corporation, is a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions, including the TeamHost™ cloud platform for creating and deploying SaaS systems without programming; HealthCapsule™, a toolkit for creating secure Health IT solutions; TeamLeader™, a project management 2.0 software for tracking and reporting on virtual teams in real-time; and cloudipedia.com, a website that brings cloud computing information to the masses. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s platform technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs.
NASA employees use open-source tools to build a site in two days with no budget
By Rutrell Yasin Jul 21, 2010, Federal Computer Week
IdeaScale Application Programming Interface; Tornado, a lightweight, open-source web development framework; MongoDB, an open-source, document-oriented database; Googlechart, an API for chart generation; Uservoice, a free, Web feedback forum; and Github, a Web-based hosting service for projects that use Git revision control system.
Robbie Schingler, one of the developers of OpenGov Tracker, describes the site as a tiny hack — and in this case, the word “hack” means something good — with immediate value. Schingler, an executive at NASA’s Office for Open Government, and co-developer Jessy Cowan-Sharp, also with NASA, created the Web site in two days during the record-setting snowstorm in February that halted activity around the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
“Two developers, two days, no money” — that was Schingler’s description of the project at a recent conference on Web development and new media for government Web managers.
The Open Government Directive, which ordered agencies to open their doors and data to the public, was the motivation for the site. The directive states that each open-government Web page had to incorporate a mechanism to provide input on the agency’s open-government plan.
In early February, the General Services Administration offered a citizen engagement tool based on the IdeaScale platform to 24 federal agencies, including NASA. Twenty-three agencies accepted.
The online dialogue tool allowed members of the public to submit, rank and comment on ideas about how agencies could best fulfill the goals of the Open Government Directive by becoming more transparent, participatory, collaborative and innovative.
Schingler and Cowan-Sharp essentially developed a site consisting of one basic page that aggregates 23 of those sites to give the public a quick glance of the best-rated contributions in each of four categories: collaboration, participation, transparency and innovation.
For instance, in the participation category, someone proposed that the Education Department promote funding for open-source textbooks. The idea is to create free textbooks that schools could customize. Another example, in the innovation category, was to let NASA employees set aside time each week for unstructured, creative thinking.
OpenGov Tracker tracked all government ideas, votes and comments. It then highlighted agencies with the most or least ideas, votes or comments. NASA topped the list with the most ideas (470), votes (4,747) and comments (700). Those with the least ideas, votes and comments were organized in another category: Needs More Love.
The developers accomplished the task on their own time using their own server on the NASA Nebula cloud computing platform. In addition to using IdeaScale’s application programming language, open-source software formed the project’s foundation.
The developers used the Python programming language with the Tornado Web development framework and MongoDB document-oriented database. The developers also used Uservoice, which is free Web feedback forum software, and Github, for storage, Schlinger said.
Here are some of their lessons learned.
- Keep it new and fresh. The developers were able to pull in new information without human intervention.
- Keep it simple. The developers only had one function, one page.
- Make it fun.
- Develop quickly. Allow developers to work in sprints and incubate the work, using open-source software and iterations, if useful.
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Virtual Global, a West Virginia corporation, is a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions, including the TeamHost™ cloud platform for creating and deploying SaaS systems without programming; HealthCapsule™, a toolkit for creating secure Health IT solutions; TeamLeader™, a project management 2.0 software for tracking and reporting on virtual teams in real-time; and cloudipedia.com, a website that brings cloud computing information to the masses. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s platform technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs.
By Kevin Fogarty, CIO
July 08, 2010 03:23 PM ET
Cloud computing is famous for being a metaphor instead of a technology, but that metaphor is increasingly hard for non-techies to understand. Many variations of cloud have emerged that have little to do with the initial vision that sparked interest– a public cloud with burst-up capability on demand.
“Public cloud is not what most of our clients are talking about right now,” according to Chris Wolf, analyst for Gartner Group’s Burton Group consultancy. “Pretty much everything’s hybrid.”
Public cloud (pay-for-play) services such as Amazon’s EC2 and Microsoft’s Azure were the proof-of-concept for cloud technology. Rather than shift the majority of their own IT to professionally maintained shared-resource services such as those, however, most companies are today using cloud to build on their internal virtual infrastructures, analysts say.
The greatest benefit of cloud is its ability to connect otherwise incompatible infrastructures, not just one or two applications at a time, and its ability to let customers dial up more compute power when they need it, says International Data Corp. analyst Ian Song. Nevertheless, IDC’s market surveys predict that spending on cloud will rise from $17 billion in 2009 to $44 billion in 2013.
“It’s not real clear in most people’s minds what virtualization or cloud will get them,” according to Roger Johnson, who evangelized both in his previous job as a senior IT manager at audio-systems reseller Crutchfield Corp., and does so now as a senior systems engineer at Richmond, Va.-based integrator SyCom Technologies.
“Most people seem like they’re interested in cloud but they don’t want to touch it until there’s more adoption and a better track record,” says Johnson.
Most companies take a roll-your-own approach to cloud, adding cloudlike interfaces to existing systems, building new systems on virtualized, highly interoperable systems, or hiring co-location, server hosting or online services to meet specific needs or east particular points of pain, Wolf says.
There is no single model for how best to mix all the various cloud service permutations, but a few consistent models have emerged:
1. Internal Clouds
In what’s turning out to be the most common form of cloud computing (and convenient for virtual-server vendor VMware,) internal, private clouds allow a company to weave layers of virtualization and management software around existing infrastructure to tie servers, storage, networks, data and applications. The goal: Once they’re interconnected and virtualized, IT can shift storage, compute power or other resources invisibly from one place to another to give all the end-user divisions all the resources they need at any time, but no more than that.
What’s the difference between a highly virtualized environment and an internal cloud? VMware says an internal cloud should also have a high degree of management automation and offer chargeback capabilities for business units. Private clouds should make managing both information and technology easier, but will blow apart the silos into which most IT organizations have been built over decades, Wolf says. “Right now the server people talk to the server people, not networks or support or anything else,” he says. “If everything’s virtualized, everything’s on ever box, so your job can’t be defined according to where the box you’re responsible for sits.”
2. External Cloud Hosting
External cloud–any IT service maintained by an external service provider and accessed through the Internet–is the best source for both cost-effective IT extensibility and of insecurity, mistrust, confusion and the potential for disaster. Among the best known U.S. providers of external cloud services are Rackspace, Terramark, Equinix, AT&T and IBM. The big worry: In a recent Portio Research survey, 68 percent of respondents say worries about security are holding them back from cloud projects; 58 percent say performance is also a drawback.
“In the public cloud a lot of the fear factor is that your data is sitting on someone else’s infrastructure,” says Vince DiMemmo, general manager of cloud and IT services at data-center hosting and services company Equinix. “When you hire someone else your expectations for security are much higher, so most customers aren’t comparing what a service provider offers compared to what they do in their own systems. They tend to be nervous about cloud, too, not for [co-location] and server-hosting that they’ve been doing for a long time.”
There’s not a lot of difference between co-location or hosting and cloud services in the platform-as-a-service market, which means any IT organization with external providers has already done most of the vetting needed for a cloud provider, says Jim Levesque, systems programmer and supervisor of the cloud-based disaster-recovery and backup system built by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for its 600-server business-application network.
“You check the security, make sure about their finances so they’re not going to disappear right away, talk to their references and make sure they’ve got good provisioning on the things that are important– plenty of I/O and network access, redundant connections and power supplies, emergency plans, all that stuff,” Levesque says.
But many customers are also worried they’ll get locked in to a single service company if the APIs, systems and interfaces their cloud provider uses don’t allow them to pick up an move back to internal servers or to a different provider’s infrastructure, according to Karl MacDonald, chief evangelist for cloud service provider Cloud.com.
3. Hybrid or Modular Approach
It’s pretty clear that the near future of IT is the hybrid cloud model, Wolf says. Hybrid cloud computing can include a mix on internal clouds, external cloud services and traditional SaaS options. The mix of pieces that hybrid should include for a specific business will end up being as unique as the IT organizations that provide it, he says.
Some small- and mid-sized companies face the same dilemma as that guy who insists he can wear the same jeans he did in high school, despite their 32-inch waist and his 42-inch belly. The CEO keeps cinching the budget a little tighter every quarter.
Smaller-scale workspace on demand services can fit the bill here. Originally conceived for applications such as on-demand test and development environments (where the need for 100 virtual workstations on which to test a software distribution script wouldn’t be unusual) workspace on demand companies such as CloudShare, Soonr or Microsoft Azure offer mini versions of the macro cloud.
Rather than buy large-scale services with a lot of configuration and management from Amazon or other hosting companies, it makes sense to have a service you can use to get IT-on-demand for workgroups rather than enterprises, according to Steve Peltzman, CIO of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
“We, like a lot of companies, have only one set of staging servers for anything, and you don’t want to add a feature because you don’t want to mess with the staging, so you have to put that off,” Peltzman says. “There are lots of needs, strategic or tactical, we have to meet during the day without having a rack of servers to pull out to do it. We look at where it makes sense to outsource SaaS providers, SalesForce, outsourcing email to Gmail, Amazon or Cloudshare for platform. Sometimes I don’t know what we’re going to use a specific service or function for, but I know we’re going to need it. That’s what I’m looking to the cloud for.”
4. Traditional SaaS
For those looking for an even smaller slice of additional functionality or capacity, plain-jane SaaS may be the way to go. The quickest way to get into “cloud computing” is to sign up for free email at Yahoo or Google, or for productivity apps from Zoho, 37Signals or a host of other services aimed at businesses or individuals.
Google’s corporate email is popular among small companies that put managing their own Exchange servers somewhere down below housekeeping and maintenance. Productivity apps are available online from Microsoft, Zoho and others who’d rather not pay for bulk upgrades of feature-heavy desktop applications.
Companies that don’t even want to have to maintain Windows can go to Desktone, ThinkGrid and a few other VDI-on-demand providers.
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Virtual Global, a West Virginia corporation, is a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions, including the TeamHost™ cloud platform for creating and deploying SaaS systems without programming; HealthCapsule™, a toolkit for creating secure Health IT solutions; TeamLeader™, a project management 2.0 software for tracking and reporting on virtual teams in real-time; and cloudipedia.com, a website that brings cloud computing information to the masses. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s platform technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs.
Companies donate code to new open source cloud initiative
By Maxwell Cooter, TechWorld
July 19, 2010 06:31 AM ET
Rackspace and NASA have teamed up to launch OpenStack, an open source cloud platform aimed at accelerating the adoption of cloud computing by making it easier to develop new applications.
Although Rackspace and NASA have not entered into a formal partnership, it is hoped that their collaboration on OpenStack will be an impetus for new cloud computing initiatives. Rackspace and NASA have been joined by companies such as AMD, Citrix, Dell, iomart, Spiceworks and many others.
Both Rackspace and NASA have donated code for the project: the former has donated the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings, while the space agency has donated the code of its Nebula Cloud Platform.
Fabio Torlini, Rackspace’s head of cloud services said that the move would rapidly accelerate the take-up[ of cloud services and also help to strengthen the move to interoperability. ” We expect our cloud platforms to become a de facto standard in time,” he said. “We really expect this to take off massively.”
Torlini added that while there would be little immediate benefit to enterprises looking to move to a cloud platform, in the long run there would be a boost to the number of applications available.
He acknowledged the concerns that many in the user community had over security in the cloud but said that by freeing up the code, there would be more opportunities to improve security. “If we’d left it like it was, it would just have been Rackspace and NASA working on their own, by freeing up the code, we enable many more companies to help improve security,” he said. He also stressed that this shouldn’t be seen as purely a Rackspace initiative, “Everyone is welcome to contribute,” he said.
“Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand,” said Chris Kemp, NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT. “To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community.
The companies have developed an OpenStack website with further information on the project with a complete list of members.
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Virtual Global, a West Virginia corporation, is a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions, including the TeamHost™ cloud platform for creating and deploying SaaS systems without programming; HealthCapsule™, a toolkit for creating secure Health IT solutions; TeamLeader™, a project management 2.0 software for tracking and reporting on virtual teams in real-time; and cloudipedia.com, a website that brings cloud computing information to the masses. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s platform technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs.
More than 80 schools will prep 50,000 workers for IT jobs
Computerworld - Beginning this fall, more than 80 community colleges and universities in the U.S. will begin training health care IT workers under a government grant program created to help fill an estimated 50,000 jobs needed to assist doctors and hospitals as they roll out electronic medical records (EMR).
The estimated 50,000 trainees are in addition to people already being trained in existing IT programs in U.S. universities, according to Dr. Charles Friedman, chief scientific officer at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The agency estimates it will spend $144 million in grant money to develop and implement curricula in colleges and universities to train the health care IT workers.
Money for the education and training effort was included in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009.
Friedman said the training programs are aimed at people who already have health care or IT backgrounds — not workers from other fields who have no previous experience or training in either discipline.
“A landscaper might be able to enter one of these programs, but if this is a person with no health care or IT background, it’s unlikely that person will be able to achieve what’s needed for these jobs in six months,” Friedman said.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has designed a curriculum to train people for 12 specific roles. The jobs are broken down into two major groups: Those for which health care IT workers can be trained in a six-month certification program, and those that require one to three years of training, such as senior clinician leaders, privacy and security specialists and more advanced technical and administrative roles.
On average, each school has or will get about $1 million to implement the curriculum; many of the schools have banded together in five regional consortia. Students graduating from the HITECH-funded programs will receive certificates in their specialties.
A significant part of the training will be for staffers at 60 regional extension centers (REC), the public-private partnerships that will eventually assist in the deployment of EMR systems at rural hospitals and physician practices with 10 or fewer doctors. Smaller health care operations like those will need help in order to meet the federal government’s “meaningful use” criteria and get reimbursements for the EMR rollouts.
The RECs, which are still being developed, will employ anywhere from 10 to 30 workers. Their responsibilities will include helping health care providers with the reimbursement process and assessing whether health care facilities have the infrastructure to implement EMR systems. The health care IT employees will also work with doctors and health care facilities to select an EMR system, oversee its installation, perform a workflow analysis of the effort and certify whether the EMR deployment meets the government’s meaningful-use standards.
Michael Kirshner, program director of the Oregon Institute of Technology’s health informatics degree program, graduated the first class of health care IT students from the baccalaureate program this spring and expects to start up the school’s grant-funded health IT program this fall.
OIT opened a simulation lab in 2007 that simulates an IT environment in the health care field to help students learn how to deploy EMR applications from leading vendors such as General Electric and Allscripts. It also familiarizes them with databases from Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. and teaches them about patient portals and secure messaging platforms from companies such as Cryptic Corp.
OIT’s program offers a bachelor’s degree in IT with an option in health informatics. IT covers the EMR implementation process, data mining and data extraction, the creation of interfaces using HL7 standards, data analytics, queries and report creation.
“We expose students to a variety of user roles to train them how to use these,” Kirshner said. “But equally relevant is how other users on a health care team would be interacting with [health IT] systems. We’re trying to create broad exposure and a hands-on learning experience so they can be an integral part of the team instead of just a single defined set of tasks.”
Kirshner said the school surveyed employers in the Portland area and came up with a list of about 300 health care IT jobs among the top 15 employers. “We’ve turned out less than 20 [health care IT] graduates, so clearly the demand is much higher,” he said.
According to Kirshner, 85% of the available jobs in the area require a bachelor’s degree and have starting salaries that range from $45,000 to $75,000.
One reason the government focused its grant program on state schools is because they tend to be far less expensive than private institutions. That gives IT and health care workers an affordable way to make lateral career moves. For example, OIT’s full baccalaureate program costs only $25,000.
Beyond the private-sector jobs available for health care IT workers, the federal government has set aside money for REC operations to help rural hospitals and small physician practices set up EMR systems and qualify for some of the billions of dollars in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement funds available to those that successfully use EMRs.
Jonathan Fuchs, chief operating officer of the Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care (FMC) in Fort Smith, Ark. opened a regional extension center in February to serve local physician practices.
That REC is working closely with local two- and four-year colleges and has worked out a deal to provide potential health care IT students with a discount for HITECH-funded courses at local schools. Typically, the certification programs cost $500 to $1,000, said Fuchs, who added that he hopes to provide internships for health care IT students.
Positions at the REC include a director, a program manager, a network data manager, a marketing manager, a program assistant, four to six EMR implementation specialists, three to four quality improvement employees and five outreach workers.
“Depending on the level of the surge, we will either outsource some of the work or add additional staff,” Fuchs said. “Some RECs have totally outsourced their implementation activities to consultants and other RECs. There are all different models across the country.”
The FMC REC is supposed to help 1,280 physicians roll out EMR systems over the next five years. The center has already signed up 550 doctors.
Physicians who roll out EMR systems under the Medicare program and meet government certification requirements can get up to $44,000 in reimbursement money. Those who choose to implement the technology under the Medicaid program, which requires that at least 30% of their practice be enrolled in the program for 90 consecutive days during a calendar year, can receive up to $64,000 to defray IT costs.
While thousands of graduates of HITECH grant-funded courses will staff REC offices throughout the county, the overwhelming majority of them will find jobs in the private sector, working at hospitals, private physician practices, long-term care facilities and other clinical operations.
“Each of the colleges is going to vigorously market its program,” Friedman said. “The assumption is because community colleges tend not to charge as much as large [private colleges], this will be affordable. In some circumstances, the community colleges are using the grant money to help students with tuition.”
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Virtual Global, a West Virginia corporation, is a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT solutions, including the TeamHost™ cloud platform for creating and deploying SaaS systems without programming; HealthCapsule™, a toolkit for creating secure Health IT solutions; TeamLeader™, a project management 2.0 software for tracking and reporting on virtual teams in real-time; and cloudipedia.com, a website that brings cloud computing information to the masses. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s platform technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs.
New federal rules that will grant medical practitioners billions of dollars to buy health information technology might make it easier for vendors new to the health IT industry to gain market share in a sector largely dominated by companies that have adhered to stricter standards, health consultants said.
The rules governing the acceptable use of e-health records to qualify for federal funding, which the Obama administration released on Tuesday, are simpler and clearer than those initially proposed in December 2009, experts said. The earlier proposal sparked concerns among small practices and hospitals, and some IT companies that meeting the first stage of requirements for meaningful use would be too time-intensive and costly.
Doctors must comply with the meaningful use rules, which include installing certified e-health systems, to receive a portion of roughly $27 billion in bonus Medicare and Medicaid payments. The government says the extra payments will encourage providers to buy health IT systems that increase safety, reduce costs and improve care.
“They did make a very serious effort to accommodate the real-world barriers that physicians have,” said David C. Kibbe, an IT consultant and senior adviser to the American Academy of Family Physicians. “The bar is significantly lower for stage one” compared with what was in the draft.
The December draft proposal would have demanded doctors comply with 25 objectives during the first year of implementation. The final rules reduce that number to 15 core objectives, including routine security monitoring, checks on drug interactions, e-prescribing and transmission of instructions for the treatment of patients using a standard computerized provider order entry.
The rules then allow doctors to pick five more demanding requirements from a menu of 10. Among them are e-health records that contain data fields for laboratory test results, the ability to send patient reminders for follow-up care, and submission of clinical surveillance data to public health agencies.
In addition, the new regulations loosen CPOE requirements by directing doctors to use the process only for entering medication orders. The earlier proposal would have required them to enter orders for medications, laboratory work, imaging studies and several other services.
Under both the proposed and final rules, additional requirements to meet the government’s definition of meaningful use would and still will be phased in during five years.
The Health and Human Services Department projects that certified e-health record software will be available for purchase in the fall.
Companies entering the health IT field for the first time might have a leg up on more established industry players, according to Kibbe. “No products have been certified yet,” he said. “If you have a legacy product that is significantly more comprehensive and complicated, and a new product that hits the nail on the head for meaningful use and just does that, you might think the newer companies have an advantage in meeting meaningful use for their customers.”
The rules will allow other innovative companies such as Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp. and Google, to penetrate the health IT space, Kibbe said.
But some health IT service companies that partner with various software vendors, including legacy product providers, say there’s plenty of room for more market participants. “The pie got bigger,” said Harry Greenspun, chief medical officer at Dell Services, the nation’s largest health IT services company. Veteran vendors can expand their hold on the market and new entrants potentially might have an easier time accessing the market, he added.
On Tuesday, HHS released a related regulation that finalizes certification standards initially released on Dec. 30. Registration for incentive payments will start January 2011, and HHS will begin disbursing the money to doctors and hospitals next spring.
“The government has lowered the barrier for adoption,” added Greenspun, who previously served as the chief medical officer for Northrop Grumman Corp., which developed AHLTA, the Defense Department’s electronic health record system.
Now that the government has relaxed some of the rules, the administration is more likely to reach the ambitious goal of establishing a nationwide network of e-health records by 2015, he said.
The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, and the Markle Foundation, a New York-based research institute that studies health IT and security issues, released a joint-statement in support of the rules. “These regulations provide a promising foundation for encouraging the effective use of health information to improve patient care,” said Mark B. McClellan, director of the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings and a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Carol Diamond, managing director of the Markle Foundation, added, “The final rule has added flexibility to encourage providers to participate in the first phase of this critical effort to improve health, promote efficiency, drive innovation and protect privacy.”
Consumer advocates provided qualified approval. “By making some reasonable concessions but standing firm against industry pressure to gut the regulations, the administration moved to improve patient safety and coordination of care, and to make our health system more efficient,” Christine Bechtel, vice president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, a patient-rights group, said in a statement.
She noted, however, “As we move forward, the regulations should be strengthened so providers who violate privacy laws are ineligible for federal IT dollars, and so providers are required to give all patients timely access to their health information.”
In addition, Greenspun said unintended consequences of the regulations might not surface until state governments, privacy groups, budget analysts and other stakeholders have more time to closely inspect the 864 pages of regulations.
July 14, 2010, 7:32 PM EDT By Lucas Mearian
Verizon announced on Wednesday a new cloud-based service offering for healthcare providers that will handle the sharing of patient information electronically between disparate platforms.
The new service, called the Verizon Health Information Exchange , consolidates clinical patient data from various providers and translates it into a standardized format that can then be accessed via a secure Web portal.
Kannan Sreedhar, vice president of Verizon Connected Health Care Solutions, said the service will address interoperability issues currently hindering physicians, hospitals and insurance companies from sharing patient information because of the myriad of applications used to create, and formats being used to store, the data.
“Providing secure access to patient data will enable health care organizations to make a quantum leap forward in the deployment of IT to meet critical business and patient-care issues,” he said in a statement.
Users of the service will be able to share data across states and regions, requesting patient data via the Web portal regardless of the IT systems and specific protocols the providers use, Verizon said.
Because the Verizon Health Information Exchange will be delivered via Verizon’s cloud computing platform, health care organizations will be able to use their current IT systems, processes and workflows, without large additional capital expenditures, the company stated.
The service charges based on a health provider’s patient record volume.
Verizon is using technology from several database, medical application vendors and service providers — including MEDfx, MedVirginia and Oracle — to deliver key features of the service, including: clinical dashboard, record locator service, cross- enterprise patient index and secure clinical messaging.
“The ability to dynamically scale technical resources and pay for those used are key benefits of health information exchange platforms hosted in the cloud,” Lynne Dunbrack, program director of IDC Health Insights said in a statement.
“Cloud-based platforms will appeal to small to mid-sized organizations looking to shift technology investment from capex to opex and to large regional or statewide initiatives that need to establish connectivity with myriad stakeholders with divergent needs and interoperability requirements,” she said.
MedVirginia Inc. , a regional health information exchange (RHIO) located in Richmond, plans to use Verizon’s Health Information Exchange service.
Formed in 2000 by a consortium of Virginia health care providers, MedVirginia launched its health information exchange in 2006. Michael Matthews, CEO of of MedVirginia, said the RHIO’s needs enhanced functionality, flexibility, performance and scalability.
“The cloud-based Verizon Health Information Exchange meets those requirements,” Matthews said.
Verizon said its service meets federal standards for privacy under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and it also complies with requirements under the Nationwide Health Information Network, which is under the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to support the secure exchange of health information over the Internet.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com .
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