Top 15 Healthcare Stories Of 2013

(11) Sharing Electronic Medical Records Still Too Hard
The pitch: Epic CEO Judy Faulkner and other health execs aren't thrilled with the state of EHR interoperability. What are today's big barriers?

Fair to say readers probably agreed this stuff is too hard?

(12) WellPoint To Launch National Telehealth Program
The pitch: Telehealth initiative provides live audio/video consultations with doctors in effort to improve patients' access to healthcare and save money.

Like our coverage of remote patient monitoring, this story about the potential of video consultations showed the power and the potential of care at a distance.

(13) Why Doctors Hate EHR Software
The pitch: Have meaningful use incentives merely propelled sales for a lot of lousy software?

I wrote this column shortly after being named section editor this fall. I was impressed by how many doctors I talked to were unimpressed by the electronic health records systems they felt were being foisted upon them.

(14) CMS CIO Leaves HealthCare.gov Mess For Private Sector
The pitch: CIO Tony Trenkle, who oversaw a $2 billion IT office for CMS, including the HealthCare.gov program, heads for the private sector.

I'm sure our coverage of the HealthCare.gov website launch misfire would rank high on the list, taken collectively, but there were so many stories to write about everything that went wrong (and so many other outlets chasing the same story), that only this one about a CIO beating a hasty retreat showed up near the top of the list.

(15) Hacking Electronic Health Records
The pitch: How a dangerous security flaw discovered in one of the most pervasive electronic medical record platforms in the US was found and fixed before it could do damage.

This story about vulnerabilities in VistA, the open-source platform originally developed by the Veterans Administration, is one we picked up earlier this month from our colleagues at Dark Reading.

What Have We Learned?
Aside from a sequel to our practice management roundup, looks like readers can't get enough of remote patient monitoring and its potential. But what do you think of this list as a model for what InformationWeek Healthcare ought to be covering in 2014? With Obamacare coming into full force, Meaningful Use Stage 2, ICD-10 coding -- there are plenty of serious issues we ought to be covering, and we will.

I'd just like to know what the sexy issues will be, too.

David F. Carr is the Editor of Information Healthcare and a contributor on social business, as well as the author of Social Collaboration For Dummies. Follow him on Twitter @davidfcarr or Google+.

Though the online exchange of medical records is central to the government's Meaningful Use program, the effort to make such transactions routine has just begun. Also in the Barriers to Health Information Exchange issue of InformationWeek Healthcare: why cloud startups favor Direct Protocol as a simpler alternative to centralized HIEs. (Free registration required.)