Over the last few years, federal and state health IT policymakers have paid little attention to the problem of managing provider identities.

The exception is the National Provider Identifier (NPI), a unique 10-digit identification number the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began issuing to providers in 2006 to help manage transactions protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

What can IT professionals expect for regulatory compliance in 2010?
More regulations, risk management and returns on their investment in
time and technology. As we reported last year about the top regulatory compliance trends of 2009, increased federal regulation and enforcement, changes to state data protection laws and major cybersecurity
policy initiatives are on the way. Here is part one of
SearchCompliance.com's top regulatory compliance trends that will
affect IT in 2010.

Continuing my series of posts about the big themes on this blog over the past year, I now turn to the topic of cloud computing. My views on how to implement cloud and SaaS have hardened considerably over the course of 2009. Halfway through the year, I took a conscious decision to promote multi-tenancy as the only acceptable architecture for cloud and SaaS infrastructures. You might expect that from someone who makes a living consulting for multi-tenant vendors. But I’ve deliberately chosen a hardline and controversial stance,

“E-signature, or digital signature, is a concept that allows for using
electronically signed documents to perform either exchange of documents
officially in circles related to government, or with the private sector
performing electronic commerce or electronic business at large,” says
Sherif Hashim, vice president of the Information Technology Industry
Development Agency (ITIDA). “With this need emerging, technology
stepped in to introduce technologies related to authenticated
signatures on documents.”