Michael J. Astrue, Commissioner of Social Security, today announced that 15 healthcare providers and networks have received $17.4 million in contract awards to provide electronic medical records to the agency.

MedVirginia has announced that it will significantly expand its MEGAHIT project with the Social Security Administration (SSA). The company has partnered with Centra in an effort to bring three hospitals online with the SSA.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Kaiser Permanente have launched a pilot project in the San Diego area that they say will let them exchange—with a patient's permission—electronic health record data about health issues, medications, and allergies for the first time.

The medical home (also known as patient-centered medical home or advanced medical home) is a composite policy construct applied to interventions intended to revitalize primary care practices and improve patient care.

National Health IT Week, Washington, D.C., featuring the Capitol Hill Healthcare Information Technology Showcase and Demonstration. Remarks by Members of Congress and federal officials begin at noon, followed by a live demonstration of the Nationwide Health Information Network.

At the Department of Health and Human Service’s first-ever "code-a-thon" today, software programmers hunkered down to mash up software code for "Connect," a set of open source tools for exchanging health information over the budding nationwide health information network.

ONC conducted a NHIN CONNECT Seminar earlier this week that was well received by the nearly 1,100 participants over the two-day event. CONNECT is a software gateway built by more than 20 federal agencies to help them build health information exchanges and securely share data among themselves and with other levels of government and the private sector. It was built in open source and was released to the public in April for use by any organization. The solution addresses the need of organizations to share health data in compliance with Nationwide Health Information Network standards and agreements. The conference focused on the ways CONNECT is being used today, as well as the user community being built around the solution to truly bring CONNECT into the public domain.

The Federal Health Architecture is making software available as a first step to help public and private health information technology systems communicate to the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN), a federal initiative to facilitate the electronic exchange of health information. The Federal Health Architecture, an E-Gov initiative led by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), is making this free software, called CONNECT, and supporting documentation available at connectopensource.org.

The 5th Nationwide Health Information Network Forum, held last month in Washington, D.C., showcased the groundbreaking work of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) trial implementations which began more than 14 months ago. This work, carried out by members of a public-private "NHIN Cooperative," lays the foundation that will serve as the next step toward secure nationwide interoperable HIE. By making information available when and where it is needed, nationwide exchange of health information promises to increase healthcare quality, reducing both cost and medical errors.