Here are some of the biggest stories in the health IT world from the past week.
1. Last Friday, Boston Children's Hospital's system experienced an outage that affected portions of the electronic system for patient care. During the outage, order labs, pharmacy and electronic prescription writing were affected. Digital imaging, patient registration and scheduling continued to run, according to a hospital statement.
2. Rep. Phil Roe, MD, (R-Tenn.) reintroduced legislation this week that would create an integrated EHR system for the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense. Rep. Roe's bill is separate from the DOD's $11 million Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization program, which seeks a commercial solution to replace the existing EHR and information management systems.
3. Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, Calif., suffered a data system disconnection at the end of February due to a hardware failure, but hospital leaders said responding to the failure was less chaotic than one might expect.
4. Pittsburgh-based UPMC invested in value-based technology solution company Health Fidelity.
5. On March 20, CMS released its proposed rule for meaningful use stage 3, which is open for public comment through May 29.
6. A March 2014 audit of application controls over Premera Blue Cross' information systems found weaknesses in the payer's network security controls.