Morning Headlines 7/15/16

Hearing to Review the VA Electronic Health Record Network

Testifying before the Senate’s Committee on Appropriations, VA executives field pointed questions about the lack of interoperability between the VA and DoD, and confirm speculation that the agency will likely move to a commercial EHR system.

Health IT & Health Information Services: 2016 Mid-Year Market Review

Healthcare Growth Partners publishes its 2016 Mid-Year Market Review, a dense and informative report on M&A activity in the health IT marketplace.

Obamacare, the secret jobs program

Politico reports that the ACA was intentionally written to save healthcare jobs during the recession rather than reduce healthcare costs. While healthcare advisors lobbied for language aimed at improving care delivery efficiencies to reduce costs, more influential advisors from the job creation team successfully argued that during the recession the country needed “more middle-class jobs and the best place to create them was in health care.”

Thune Leads Senate REBOOT Members in Introducing Legislation to Improve Meaningful Use Program

Six republican senators introduce a bill that would limit the Meaningful Use reporting periods to 90-days, expand availability of hardship exemptions, and eliminate the “all-or-nothing” structure of the attestation process by allowing hospitals to satisfy MU requirements as long as they attest to 70 percent of the required metrics.

2016 Survey of US Physicians: Physician awareness, perspectives, and readiness for MACRA

A Deloitte survey measuring MACRA awareness among US physicians finds that 50 percent of non-pediatric physicians have never heard of MACRA, and 79 percent do not support tying compensation to quality.