It was, as always, an eventful year for the health information technology industry, everywhere from hospitals to physician practices, vendor headquarters to the halls of Congress. 2014 was marked by big stories about ICD-10, privacy and security and patient safety. It saw one of the biggest mergers in recent years, and pointed to new avenues ahead for interoperability and data exchange.

As we prepare for another busy year ahead, we look back on Healthcare IT News' 10 most popular stories of 2014.

ICD-10 delayed, doc pay patched again (April 1)
To the surprise of many, the House of Representatives passed a sustainable growth rate patch in March that also contained a delay for the ICD-10 deadline. The U.S. Senate soon the passed the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014, too, kicking the ICD-10 can down the road for yet another year.

'Jury still out' on HIE sustainability (April 28)
With many health information exchanges having exhausted their funding -- and some having already gone out of business -- HIE is at a crossroads, just as data liquidity is becoming more important than ever. Some innovative exchanges are proving their value, though.

Deaths by medical mistakes hit records (July 18)
Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the U.S. -- third only to heart disease and cancer -- claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year. At a Congressional hearing this past summer, patient safety officials put their best ideas forward on how to solve the crisis. IT was often front and center in the discussions.

4-year long HIPAA breach uncovered (January 2)
The five-hospital Riverside Health System, in southeast Virginia, kicked off the year by announcing that, from September 2009 through October 2013, a former  employee had inappropriately accessed the Social Security numbers and electronic medical records of 919 patients.

Top HIE vendors of 2014 named (February 12)
Not all HIE technology is created equal, according to Black Book Rankings, whose report on health information exchange vendors gave top marks to Covisint, Informatics Corporation of America, Cerner, Allscripts and Infor.

Hospital takes EHR heavyweight to court (January 6)
Charging that it failed to meet the go-live deadline and its product didn't comport with 2014 federal meaningful use criteria, one rural Montana hospital filed suit against a big name electronic health record system vendor.

HIPAA data breaches climb 138 percent (February 6)
When it comes to privacy and security, the numbers tell the story: Consider 29.3 million -- the the number of patient health records compromised in a HIPAA data breach since 2009. Or 138 percent, the percent in the number of breaches since 2012.

Network glitch brings down Epic EMR (January 28)
An IT network failure caused a Florida health system to experienced unplanned downtime for its $80 million Epic EMR and several other business applications. The outage, officials reported, lasted nearly two days.

Healthcare IT News unveils 2014 Best Hospital IT Departments winners (September 29)
In reading the 25 profiles of this year's winners in Healthcare IT News' 4th annual Best Hospital IT Departments program, you'll see only one reference to salary and benefits. That suggests that teamwork, communication, respect and a sense of accomplishment from one’s work all matter as much, if not more, than money.

Cerner, Siemens and the future of EHRs (August 11)
A few days its landscape-changing $1.3 billion merger with Cerner, Siemens Health Services CEO John Glaser told Healthcare IT News what led up to the deal, how his experience as a health system CIO could help smooth integration challenges and what to expect over the months and years to come.