Eleven months after the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) selected Cerner to replace its in-house electronic health record system, the $16 billion contract hasn’t been finalized. According to Politico, two men in the social circle of President Donald Trump may be to blame for holding up the project—and neither man officially works for his administration.

In a speech at AcademyHealth’s Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C., CMS Administrator Seema Verma said giving researchers the same access to data for other federal health programs that they can currently utilize for fee-for-service Medicare can help support “the creation of tools to help consumer make better care decisions.”

Physicians, hospitals and health systems cited a variety of reasons for looking for a new electronic health record (EHR) vendor, from seeking better functionality to meeting new regulatory requirements. The fact the change likely won’t bring a quick return on their investment, however, doesn’t seem to deter anyone looking to make a switch.

A state board in Illinois has recommended voiding a seven-year, $62 million contract for Epic to implement a new electronic health record (EHR) system at University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System in Chicago, finding some merit to Cerner’s claims that there was conflict of interest with the firm hired to evaluate the bids.

Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report mirrored what was released last month in its report on breaches involving protected health information (PHI) in prior years. Whereas all other industries profiled—including education, financial and retail—saw the majority of their breaches come from external forces, most of the healthcare industry’s threats came from inside.

The U.S. Coast Guard has announced it will join the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) $4.3 billion rollout of a Cerner electronic health record (EHR) system, giving the health IT giant yet another major customer within the federal government.

A survey from Black Book Research found when healthcare organizations don’t have a master patient database across various departments, match rates when exchanging records with other health systems are much lower.

Facebook had been discussing a data sharing project with hospitals and medical groups to match patient data with socioeconomic information from Facebook profiles, but CNBC reports the project has been put on hold as the social network faces scrutiny over how it collects and shares data on its users.