Maverick's Update

We need to get someone funny in here. The people running for president are decidedly not funny. The boring King Charles was bored at his own coronation a few months ago. People we could always count on to make us laugh, like Robin Williams, are no longer with us. But laughing is important, so we need to figure this out. Luckily, we have some good news to report in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below. Who knew health information policy news could be funny? [We did — that was a rhetorical question. That’s why we are writing a blog about health information policy and you’re not. Please read on so you can understand.]

More totally funny health information policy news from this week’s headlines:

• Some health IT words just sound funny, like “cloud-savvy.” Staff at the Duke University Health System and Microsoft will get to sound funny a lot because they will be doing things like training up a “cloud-savvy IT workforce” as part of a new 5-year partnership to figure out how to incorporate artificial intelligence in the health care system.
• Despite the fact that it was their idea in the first place, it is funny that payer and provider industry leaders decided to write a letter to CMS urging the agency to hold off on finalizing the electronic prior authorization rule (ePA). Apparently, they didn’t think it was funny that conflicting technical standards exist between the ePA proposed rule and the attachments rule.
• It is funny that ONC, in an analysis of the AHA Information Technology Supplement Survey, decided to point out that hospitals with less money were not as good at collecting data about patients with less money.

One Thoughtful Paragraph