Tech News: Feds name health IT certifiers; IBM seeks to crack China's health sector

Federal health officials gave two firms -- the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology in Chicago, Ill., and the Drummond Group in Austin, Texas, -- the power to certify electronic medical record vendors effective immediately, The Hill reports. "As providers move toward mandatory adoption of EHR systems, HHS created an incentive program designed to encourage the transition." Hospitals and doctors can receive payments for achieving "meaningful use," a set of requirements laid out by federal officials. The certification process is part of meeting that requirement (Lillis, 8/30).

IBM, meanwhile, is looking to capitalize on health reform in China, The Wall Street Journal reports. "The Chinese government's plan to spend billions on health-care reform has multinational technology companies like International Business Machines Corp. and Dell Inc. racing to secure a slice of a huge potential market that has long been too fragmented and disorganized to crack. IBM is deploying technology in a group of hospitals in China's southern Guangdong province that will help the hospital standardize its patient records, then use the records to make statistical analyses of traditional Chinese medicine treatments" (Chao, 8/31).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.