As many in the health IT field descend on Las Vegas for the 2012 HIMSS conference later this month, it’s been announced by the Collaborative Health Consortium that it will hold a first-ever “eCollaboration Forum” during the event.

The new forum will explore collaborative platforms as foundations for transformation to accountable care.  Through a series of keynote presentations and panel discussions, attendees will learn what a collaborative healthcare platform is and why the healthcare industry needs it, discover paths to take to effectively implement collaborative technologies, and obtain further resources to help evaluate the solutions available in the shift toward an accountable care health model.

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Voice recognition provider Nuance has launched a contest to get developers to integrate voice recognition technology into mobile or Web-based healthcare applications.

The contest, dubbed the “2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge,” calls on independent software vendors, internal development teams and health insurance providers to find new ways to incorporate speech recognition into their medical software.  Nuance already has several mHealth apps using its solution.

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As we close out 2011, we can look back at all that happened in terms of health IT over the last 12 months.  While it was an exciting time for the healthcare industry and its advancement towards digital and mobile technology, 2011 also brought about many challenges and lessons for healthcare organizations of all shapes and sizes as we enter the new year.

InformationWeek published an excellent roundup of the top 9 health IT stories of 2011, spanning everything from providers rushing to integrate Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems to qualify for the government’s Meaningful Use financial incentives, to the proliferation of mobile health apps, and the pitfalls of not securing sensitive patient data that resulted in a few high profile data breaches.

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According to new research data out from Deltek, the amount spent on health IT on behalf of the federal government is set to surpass $6.5B by 2016 — up from roughly $4.5B in 2011, representing a CAGR of a healthy 7.5 percent.

The report, dubbed the GovWinIQ report, said that unlike the overall federal market which faces heavy budget cuts, the health IT market will continue to grow due to rising healthcare costs, an aging population, and continued high unemployment which will all work to drive up federal healthcare expenditures over the next decade.  According to the research, its projected that federal healthcare expenditures will more than double, from $766 billion in 2011 to more than $1.4 trillion in 2020.

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EchoBase, a provider of “mobile interface” solutions for the healthcare industry, has announced a new integration with Gazzang to power secure access to clinical systems — providing physicians and clinicians mobile access to things like patient medical records and other internal systems while limiting the risk of sensitive data breach or exposure.

Through its “Resonate” solution, echoBase provides a single mobile interface to electronic medical record, practice management, clinical and financial systems that allows clinicians to interact with electronic patient data in real-time, with or without an Internet connection.  The solution currently works on both Apple iPads and iPhones/iPod Touches.

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On Monday during the mHealth Summit in Washington, DC, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) — the largest and most influential trade group in the health IT industry — formally launched a subsidiary targeted directly at the mobile health IT market.

Formally known as “mHIMSS,” the subsidiary will be headed up by Edna Boone, senior director for mobile initiatives at HIMSS since 2008.  The first order of business for mHIMSS was publishing a new report and survey on the current state of mobile technology in healthcare, which included responses from 164 mostly hospital-based CIOs and IT managers.  The survey revealed that just 38% of healthcare organizations had a formal strategy or policy regarding the use of mobile devices, with another 51% saying they were developing a policy.

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It was announced recently that the Obama Administration has taken new steps to encourage doctors and healthcare organizations to adopt and start leveraging new healthcare IT.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the government is now making it even easier for doctors and other health professionals to adopt health IT and receive incentive payments that were previously made available under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.

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