Vital Signs

A chief information officer, or CIO, is the executive responsible for the people, processes, and technology of an organization’s IT function so that they deliver outcomes that support its goals. This post explains how the CIO differs from clinical informatics roles such as the CCIO, CMIO, CNIO, and CRIO, what a study of 142 hospital CIOs found about innovation capability, what an AMIA task force concluded about clinical informatics officers, and what studies of nursing informatics officer roles in Canada and military facilities found.

An ASO, or administrative services only, arrangement is a contract in which an insurer or other firm performs administrative work for a self-funded plan without taking on the risk. This post explains the idea and the typical services, what a 2024 Health Affairs study found about the share of enrollees in ASO arrangements, what a 2026 interview study found about third-party administrator fees, and what a 2026 study found about a reference pricing program for self-funded employers.

A whitelist, increasingly called an allowlist, is a list of entities approved for authorized access or privileged membership in a particular area of computing. This post explains how whitelists work, how NIST describes application whitelisting for stopping malware and unauthorized software, how a German research network manages allowlists for authentication between organizations, and what a 2025 study found when it restricted AI web retrieval to authoritative neurology sources.

SSL, or Secure Socket Layer, is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted connection from a browser to a web server. This post explains how it works in plain language, why the modern protocol is TLS, what the NIST guidance in SP 800-52 Revision 2 requires of federal systems, how the HIPAA Security Rule treats transmission security, and what a study of the 3,000 top-ranked German-language health websites found about outdated protocol versions.

A practice management system is software that automates the transactions and workflows of a practice, such as capturing patient demographics, scheduling and registration, and revenue cycle management. This post explains what it does and how it connects to the EHR, what an academic health system study found about the time and cost of billing and insurance activities, what a survey of 49 practices found about EHR returns, and what a German survey of 201 general practitioners found about digital maturity.

NEMSIS, the National EMS Information System, is the framework for collecting, storing, and sharing standardized emergency medical services data from states across the country. This post explains what it is, who runs it, and what three 2026 studies using NEMSIS data found: national ambulance response times across more than 32 million activations, rural-urban differences in EMS care across more than 45 million responses, and how often weight was documented for children who received weight-based medications.

HITAC, the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee, is a federal advisory committee created under the 21st Century Cures Act to recommend policies, standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria to the National Coordinator for Health IT. This post explains what the statute says about its duties, target areas, and membership, and how two recent studies on USCDI alignment and FHIR-based data standards show the kind of work its recommendations affect.

DSRIP, the Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program, is a Medicaid delivery system reform program that gives states funding to help hospitals and other providers change how they deliver care to Medicaid beneficiaries. This post explains the idea and reviews what four studies found: New Jersey claims data on asthma and readmissions, a California safety analysis, a safety-net hospital infection and sepsis initiative, and a protocol for studying new Massachusetts Medicaid ACOs.

The Chronic Care Model, developed by Edward Wagner and colleagues, is a framework with six dimensions that helps health care teams care for people with long-term conditions. This post explains the six dimensions and the role of clinical information systems, what a 2026 meta-analysis found about collaborative chronic care models for bipolar disorder, what a study of 470 accountable care organizations found about health IT and unplanned admissions, and how information technology supports care coordination.

An Ambulatory Payment Class, or APC, is a payment category used for outpatient claims under Medicare’s prospective payment system. This post explains how the federal regulations group clinically similar outpatient services into APCs, how weights and packaging work, and what a 2026 JAMA Health Forum study and a 2024 simulation found about site-neutral payment methods built on APC groups.

A web portal is a website or service that offers a broad set of resources and services through one interface. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary’s meanings, including enterprise portals and the split between internal and external portals, and what recent reviews found about patient portals: a 2026 review of asthma and COPD outcomes, a 2025 meta-analysis of who uses hospital portals, and a 2026 meta-analysis of use among older adults.

SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol, is a messaging protocol that lets programs on different kinds of operating systems exchange information using HTTP and XML. This post explains what a SOAP message is, how SOAP differs from REST and FHIR, what a Minnesota public health project found when it used HL7 and SOAP web services to connect an immunization system to a disease surveillance system, and why message size has been a concern in hospital networks.

PIX, or Patient Identifier Cross-referencing, is an Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise profile that links the identifiers a patient has in different systems so that information about one person can be correlated. This post explains its actors and identifier domains, what a software architecture study said about combining master patient indexes with deduplication engines, what an Austrian project learned from IHE-based shared records, and what a machine learning study found about tuning a master patient index.

A national patient identifier is a system for uniquely identifying every recipient of health care. This post explains the idea and its link to HIPAA, why standards exist for provider and employer identifiers but not for individuals, and what studies found about duplicate records in master patient indexes, the demographic fields available for matching across nine health systems, and biased estimates when discharge data lack a unique identifier.

HIPAA administrative simplification is the part of the law that lets the Department of Health and Human Services require standards for electronic health care transactions, code sets, identifiers, and privacy and security measures. This post explains what each part means, what the federal regulations require of covered entities, and how later rules added ICD-10 code sets, provider identifiers, and operating rules for payments.

Documentation integrity is the accuracy of the complete health record, including governance, patient identification, authorship, amendments, corrections, and audits of documentation used for claims. This post explains the term, what the HIPAA rules say about amendments and integrity controls, what a qualitative survey found about physician experience with documentation queries, and how new research frames record integrity for AI-assisted documentation.

The Continuity of Care Record, or CCR, is a standard for a summary of a patient’s health information that a clinician can send at referral or transfer and a patient can carry. This post explains how the CCR was developed, how it relates to the Continuity of Care Document, and what studies found on its use in medication reconciliation, a Korean transfer note proposal, and personal health record data models.

Ambulatory care is clinical care provided on an outpatient basis to people who are able to walk about, covering diagnosis, observation, treatment, and rehabilitation. This post explains how ambulatory settings differ for health IT, what a systematic review found about lists of ambulatory care sensitive conditions in Europe, and what a quality improvement study of 263 clinicians found about ambient AI scribes and burnout.

The virtual medical record, or vMR, is a data model for representing the data that clinical decision support engines analyze or produce. This post explains why decision support needs a simplified record, how HL7 standardized one, what a multinational study found when a vMR-based data integrator supported guideline-based decision support, and how the vMR compares with openEHR archetypes in two comparison studies.

The semantic web is an effort to give the content of web documents meaning that machines can understand, using standards, markup languages, and processing tools. This post explains RDF and OWL in plain language, what a 37-paper systematic review found about semantic technologies and EHR data quality, what an 81-publication review found about ontologies in decision support rules, and what a review of 14 studies found about semantic interoperability in EHRs.