May 28, 2013 — This week on “Federal Tech Talk”, host John Gilroy interviews Kerry Weems, the vice president and general manager for Health Solutions for General Dynamics Information Technology.

Weems has twenty eight years of experience at the Department of Health and Human Services, and is currently the person making sure HHS is happy with the way the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) is managed.

This sounds quite esoteric unless you review what happened last week.

On May 22, 2013 HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made quite a splash by announcing that “more than half of all doctors and other eligible providers have received Medicare or Medicaid incentive payments for adopting or meaningfully using electronic health records.”

A federal information technology professional might ask how was that data collected, stored, and then assembled to make a decision that these physicians were complying with guidelines in order to be eligible for these incentive payments.

This is where the CMS Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) becomes a key part of the process.

During the far ranging interview, Weems talks about security, the cloud, mobile devices, and ways the program may change in the next few years.

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