News
For the coming new year, healthcare groups and their business associates need to get their privacy and security houses in order, as they will be facing new audits and more monetary enforcement surrounding data breaches -- this according to Leon Rodriguez, director of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The recommendations for Stage 3 of meaningful use are now out for comment. Coincidentally or not, there is a new degree of pessimism about when health IT interoperability will ever be achieved.
The National eHealth Collaborative's Health Information Exchange Learning Network has recommendations for tackling some of the most challenging HIE issues.
Buried within the latest Ponemon Institute study are some perhaps surprising statistics indicating that privacy and security are scaring a substantial chunk of providers away from joining a health information exchange.
The National Quality Forum Board of Directors has unanimously named Christine K. Cassel as its new president and chief executive officer. Cassel will begin her position at NQF effective mid-summer 2013, according to an NQF statement made Dec. 17.
The decision to implement clinical decision support may be a tricky one. Once you've committed to spending the time, money and resources on getting it up and running, you want to be certain it will fly within the scope of what your healthcare system can offer.
Scott Lundstrom, group vice president of IDC Health Insights, says that states should expect the final health insurance exchange deadline to be pushed back and calls the federal-state model a “tiger trap.”
With the Dec. 14 deadline on health insurance exchanges, states were required to provide a blueprint of their plans to the Department of Health and Human Services for how they will create their state-based health insurance exchanges. About half of the states have decided to surrender control to the federal government to build an exchange for them.
At the Healthcare IT News/HIMSS Media Privacy & Security Forum in Boston on Dec. 13, two CIOs offered their tips on conducting risk assessments -- and the OCR's chief enforcer reminded the audience of the high cost of not doing them.
In 2011, Micky Tripathi, founder and CEO of Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC) and health IT industry expert, found himself in unfamiliar territory after an unencrypted MAeHC laptop containing 14,475 patient medical records was stolen from an employee's locked car. After working to rectify the situation transparently, Tripathi said no one is immune from data breaches.