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Cleveland Clinic worked with Epic, its electronic health record vendor, to develop and implement a COVID-19 home monitoring program that is now available for other healthcare organizations across the country to use. Collaboration among clinicians and analysts helped the Clinic to rapidly design, build and launch the technology in just 10 days. Typically, it would have taken three months to do so, said Dr. Eric Boose, associate chief medical information officer at the Clinic. (Coutre, 4/30)

The Trump administration's top health IT official on Thursday said the healthcare industry would be better poised to address the coronavirus pandemic had HHS' recently released interoperability regulations been around earlier, even as the agency delays enforcement. "If we'd had this rule several years ago, we'd be in a far, far better spot for … knowing what's going on with this pandemic," Dr. Donald Rucker, chief of HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, said during a webinar hosted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. (Cohen, 4/30)

In the past six weeks, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts recorded more than half a million telehealth visits with patients. Before COVID-19, the average number of telehealth visits over a six-week period was 5,000. That shift to virtual medical treatment during the coronavirus pandemic will likely create permanent changes to health care delivery, according to the insurer. (Becker, 4/30)