Blog

With the advent of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)/HITECH Act and the promise of stimulus funds, physicians are mulling ways to add electronic medical records (EMRs) to their practices.

People who get paid to try to break into information systems are in a great position to give advice. Here at Redspin, Inc., a company of "ethical hackers" and IT security consultants based in Carpinteria, Calif., we've found that the healthcare companies most successful at safeguarding electronic information tend to follow these five best practices.

Any time a transition is widely likened to Y2K, misconceptions are bound to crop up - and a number of myths typically sprout. ICD-10 is by no means exempt from such chaos. And so it's time to kill the most prominent of those myths at the root.

The chorus is growing and getting louder. A bipartisan group of 27 U.S. senators are calling on CMS to relax some of the requirements to achieve meaningful use and adopt a more manageable implementation process.

In my summary of the March HIT Standards Committee meeting I mentioned the new ONC Interoperability Framework and the related RFPs. Here's the detail I promised in my previous blog about ONC.

As EMRs gain greater adoption, multiple types of fraud resulting from exposure of health data has skyrocketed, according to a report by market research company Javelin Strategy & Research.

A recent survey conducted by health IT vendor athenahealth and Sermo, an online physician community, painted a pretty grim picture of how physicians are feeling about the future of medicine. Against that background, the numbers surrounding EHRs are somewhat better. Eighty-one percent of physicians held a very favorable or somewhat favorable opinion of EHRs.

In a March 23 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Deborah Peel, MD, argues that unless we put patients in control of their electronic healthcare records and put safeguards in place to make that data secure and private, the push to have a nationwide EHR system will fail. Peel is absolutely correct.

CMS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, along with CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, proposed that both ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM/PCS code sets be frozen two years before the compliance deadline.

As we wait for the federal government to finalize important sections of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), there is a lot of talk about the financial incentives for implementing electronic health records (EHR). And understandably so. Practices that implement an EHR under the federal government’s guidelines stand to gain nearly $50,000 in incentives over the next five years.