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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have released a new fact sheet on the ICD-10 coding system healthcare organizations will be required to use by Oct. 1, 2013. The new classification system, used by hospitals and physicians both for classifying disease and for billing, promises significant improvements over the ICD-9 system by providing greater detail and the ability to capture additional advancements in clinical medicine.

Congress will likely cut Medicaid and Medicare payments to health care providers who haven't adopted interoperable EMRs by 2014, according to the Obama administration. However, the debate over interoperability among health care providers, which has been going on for years, could take well beyond the 2014 timeframe to be solved, industry experts say.

As the federal government prepares to spend up to $27 billion in stimulus funds to promote EMR implementation, a health technology industry survey suggests that a number of hospitals, health clinics, and insurance firms are violating federal security rules on patient data and putting sensitive health information at risk.

In a poll taken during the closing panel of the Health 2.0 Conference last Wednesday, three out of four attendees predicted it would take at least six years to get more than half the country's physicians in small practices to start using EHRs.