The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology announced it is working with HHS' Office for Civil Rights on a project to raise awareness among clinicians about securing health information on mobile devices, including laptops, tablets and smartphones.

The privacy and security mobile device project builds on the existing security-rule provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act from 2006 and will identify privacy and security good practices, according to an e-mailed message from the ONC. The ONC plans to hold a public roundtable about the project this spring.

Dr. Farzad Mostashari, head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, predicts at least 100,000 providers will receive federal electronic health-record incentive payments by year's end.

Mostashari offered his prediction in a post on the ONC's Health IT Buzz blog. He isn't taking a giant leap of faith, given the explosive growth in the number of providers who have registered and been paid over the past three months under the two incentive programs authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Email has been so commonplace for so long that some people consider it nearly obsolete. But in the health-care profession, its use for communications between doctors and their patients is still controversial.

Opponents worry that doctors can't read patients by reading their emails. Important signals can be missed, they say, when doctors can't see their patients' facial expressions, hear the tone of their voices or take note of their body language, and care can suffer as a result.

They're also concerned about the security of email communications, as well as doctors' potential liability for the content and results of email exchanges.