New This Week on HealthIT.gov

In This Issue

Always trying to be helpful, we have a pair of new resources that you might find useful. Check them out!

New Security Risk Assessment (SRA) tool

In collaboration with the HHS Office for Civil Rights, we released this morning a new tool designed to help practices conduct and document a comprehensive assessment to identify risks in their organizations from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule. The SRA tool also produces a report that can be useful during audits. You can read the news release announcing the new tool here.

Meet Bonnie

Bonnie is a newly released testing tool that goes live Tuesday and will help you sort out electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) designed to support streamlined and efficient pre-testing of eCQMs used in the Meaningful Use program. This tool is designed for use by measure developers as part of their development process to provide specific feedback on the behavior of the CQM logic. Vendors may see a benefit when testing measure implementation into EHRs either by using a test deck built by a measure developer, or since Bonnie is an open source tool, by building its own patient test deck.

Bonnie allows measure developers to do the following:

Independently load quality measure definitions from the Measure Authoring Tool (MAT)

Convert measure definitions into a format allowing execution of the measure logic

Rapidly craft synthetic test patients

Provide expected results for the test patients and evaluate if the defined logic behaves as expected, or deviates from the intent of the measure

If you want to meet Bonnie, we are hosting two identical training sessions on April 7. We expect lots of interest, so register for the sessions now. 10 -11 a.m. EDT sessionhttps://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/521285847 or for the 2 -3 p.m. EDT sessionhttps://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/129588895.

Bonnie is sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the ONC and has been developed by MITRE.

Delivery System Reform and Health IT

If you are in the neighborhood Tuesday or want to tune in, our own Kelly Cronin, Health Reform Coordinator at the ONC, will present the opening keynote presentation at the2014 State Healthcare IT Connect Summit, April 1-2 in Baltimore, MD, Kelly will kick the summit off on Tuesday and discuss 'HIT and HIE enabled Delivery and Payment Reform, an ongoing partnership between State and Federal Government.' Pre-register today to receive complimentary access to all sessions at the two Day Program via Live HD Webcast (with PPT). Feel free to peruse the conference agenda.

Expanding Funds for Health IT in Tennessee's Poorest Rural Counties

The latest round in a White House Rural Council initiative to link rural doctors and hospitals with financing they need to adopt Health IT, such as electronic health records, kicked off Wednesday in Tennessee. The program focuses on the poorest 10 counties in Tennessee. The Tennessee program is part of a broader initiative that generated over $70 Million in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other partners for rural hospitals and clinics in 2012 and 2013. For more, check out the blog post by Leila Samy, the ONC's Rural Health IT Coordinator, and Bobby Goode, Tennessee State Director, Rural Development.

Got a question? We've got the answer

Check out the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) which answer common questions related to Health IT. Looking for a specific answer? Browse Questions by Topic. You can also find recently added FAQs and the most popular questions.

To view other NLC resources, visit the Implementation Resources repository.