ARRA Meaningful Use FAQ #1

What is Meaningful Use criteria? Where to get started?
Meaningful Use criteria is defined as part of ARRA by Dept of Health and Human Services and published on their website. HHS is the authority on this. Visit this HHS page to get started. Word of caution: Meaningful Use definition runs into 100s of pages, as does any Federal document.


Who certifies Meaningful Use?
CCHIT is the only certification body currently authorized to certify EHRs for Meaningful Use. The certification criteria from CCHIT is posted here on their website.

Is Meaningful Use criteria final?
No. HHS has issued two subsequent definitions so far - Preliminary ARRA certification (2009) and Interim Final Rule (2010). The final rule for Meaningful Use definition is yet to be released by the HHS, which will be the final definition of Meaningful Use that the Providers need to satisfy to get the Federal payments.

Health IT jargons revealed.

There are tons of Health IT jargons floating around. Not many of us would know or care to know what they are and whom they refer to. Here is a bunch of jargons and the source of origin.

ARRA - American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [www.recovery.gov]

ARRA Healthcare Stimulus - Set of federal stimulus funding set aside for Healthcare reforms [read more]

HHS - US Dept. of Health and Human Services [link]

CMS - Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Federal agency under Dept. of Health and Human Services [read more]

Meaningful Use for Providers and Hospitals - Set of criteria from HHS/CMS to prove meaningful use of EHR by Providers and Hospitals to receive payments under the Federal incentive program [read more]

CCHIT - Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, an independent non-profit organization promoting interoperability in Health IT [read more]

HITSP - Health Information Technology Standards Panel, a public-private partnership contracted by HHS responsible for bringing together various standards for achieving adoption of Health IT [link]

IHE - Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, an organization that publishes standards and specs for industry vendors to test and establish interoperability with other healthcare systems. [link]

PQRI - Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, a quality reporting system established by CMS for providers to report quality measures on the professional services furnished to Medicare beneficiaries. [link] 

NQF - National Quality Forum, an non-profit organization established to identify and endorse quality improvement in Healthcare through use of Information Technology. [link]

Running out of space on C drive?

I have a 50GB C drive partition with the standard tools Visual Studio, SQL Server etc installed on my Vista. I would run out of space once in a while in C drive eventhough my installed software wouldn't account more than 7 GB. How to find culprit? Windows doesn't make it easy to identify the folders consuming the most storage space. But, there are tools out there. I used Windirstat to dig deeper. It's a great tool and open source. So, no worries of malware.

1) Ran the Windirstat. Got this awesome split of storage crunchers by type and location. It displays the max consumptions by list of file types and this gorgeous motherboard look-alike graphic pinpointing to the specific files. Here is a snapshot.

2) Winsxs folder was the primary culprit with 10GB of space. You can find out why Winsxs takes space and what's in it by reading this thread. Other culprits were SQL Server DB transaction logs, PDB files, SVN-BASE files
3) To reduce the size of Winsxs (only if you have Vista with SP1 installed), run the "vsp1cln" from cmd prompt and say 'yes' to permanently install SP1. This will remove the ton of SP1 backups leftover in Winsxs.
4) To reduce the SQL Server Transaction logs(mine being a dev machine..logs are waste of storage), read this thread and this fix. I changed the recovery model to Simple and ran DBCC SHRINKFILE on the log files. Also, there were few old log files that probably never got deleted with gigs of space. Got rid of them as well!
5) And, PDB files need to deleted as and when they get created. I don't see any other option for developer machines.

Hope this helps!

Followup of Google Buzz privacy.

In my last post on Google Buzz privacy flaws, i wrote about a few things to watch for. Well, they seem to have triggered lot of issues faced by Google users. Read this post from Techcrunch. Seems, it's going to take a while to flush out these. Stay awake till then!

Google Buzz Privacy

This one is for the privacy buffs! Watch out for Privacy issues in Buzz. By default, it puts almost all your address book contacts list on the public domain(following and followers). Which means eveyone gets to see the list of people i email and chat with. Not everyone will be fine with this. If it sounds like you, read these posts to block them from public view.


What it is about - http://bit.ly/9Yk8fd

How to fix it - http://bit.ly/cy7U6i

About Mission and Vision statements.

Image by janusz l via Flickr

“Mission Statements” and “Vision Statements” do two distinctly different jobs.

A Mission Statement defines the organization's purpose and primary objectives. Its prime function is internal – to define the key measure or measures of the organization’s success – and its prime audience is the leadership team and stockholders.

Vision Statements also define the organizations purpose, but this time they do so in terms of the organization’s values rather than bottom line measures (values are guiding beliefs about how things should be done.) The vision statement communicates both the purpose and values of the organization. For employees, it gives direction about how they are expected to behave and inspires them to give their best. Shared with customers, it shapes customers’ understanding of why they should work with the organization.

Read more here or simple Google!