EHRs

Four former Cerner employees filed a class-action complaint this week against the EHR vendor for allegedly mismanaging its retirement plan by maintaining expensive investment options that cost participants millions of dollars, according to court documents obtained by Bloomberg Law.

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner on Jan. 22 emailed some of the EHR giant's largest U.S. hospital clients, asking them to voice disapproval of HHS' proposed interoperability rule, CNBC reports.

ONC's proposed interoperability rules will require the healthcare industry to adopt standardized application programming interfaces to allow patients to access their medical records via smartphone apps, according to a Jan. 19 The Cap Times report.

While the widespread adoption of EHRs has helped hospitals transition from paper to electronic-based medical records, the technology has also contributed to clinician burnout and limited physician's face time with patients.

Fulton County Medical Center in McConnellsburg, Pa., on Feb. 3 will combine its primary care and specialty care EHR systems under a single Meditech platform.

Technology giants including Apple, Amazon and Google are just a few of many companies looking to capitalize on consumers' increasing demand for easier health records access, according to a Jan. 21 Business Insider and Kaiser Health News report. 

Steward Health Care announced on Jan. 21 that it will extend its partnership with Meditech by implementing the company's EHR across the Dallas, Texas-based health system's 35 hospitals.

UHIN, a health information exchange for 95 percent of Utah hospitals, will implement NextGate's cloud-based enterprise master patient index, according to a Jan. 16 news release.

Epic is reportedly telling customers that it will not pursue further integrations with Google Cloud, according to a Jan. 17 CNBC report.

Clinicians are constantly thinking and operating in a "process improvement mode," New Bedford, Mass-based Southcoast Health CIO Jim Feen says, making his role challenging and at the same time always exciting.