I am wrestling with a much longer piece on the EMR than I was hoping it would be, but silly me I’ve got myself mired in CHINs, ePrescribing and RHIO.  And given that I’m going to see Duran Duran tonight I will doubtless be further into "Rio" before I’m done, and hopefully she’ll still be dancing in the sand…

So meanwhile go look at these pieces.  In the first Healthcare Informatics features Nine Tech Trends that it thinks are hot in health care. I’m not certain that the list is quite correct, but it’s well worth a scan and I do like this one quote from a hospital CIO in New Jersey:

"I really think we’re just beginning to see digitization," Sharrott
says. "I think if we’re talking 10 or 20 years out, the amount of
integrated digitization is going to be amazing."

Meanwhile the ever wonderful Jane Sarasohn Kahn has her wrap up from HIMSS over at iHealthbeat. She pretty much confronts the inter-operability issue head on. 

Finally, Brailer is very concerned that adoption will be done in silos,
creating more IT fragmentation and an even greater barrier to
interoperability. This is a very real possibility because in the United
States we’ve made an art out of building a fragmented health system
based on outmoded regulations, unchecked competition and other
externalities. The great value for Americans and the national economy
in achieving interoperable health information networks will be what
Brailer calls "the ubiquitous sharing of patient information."

The
leap of faith here is that nationally interoperable health information
networks will be developed as regional programs adopt sharing through
open standards and convergent business practices and policies. As
Brailer characterized, interoperability will occur "not from the top
down, but inside-out."

Developing interoperable health
information systems will require the collaboration of the broad range
of stakeholders in communities to give up their proprietary data
concerns and ante up cash and a collective spirit.