Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)

First he won on Jeopardy!, now he's going to try to beat leukemia. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center announced Friday that it will deploy Watson, IBM's famed cognitive computing system, to help eradicate cancer.

Device encryption may seem like a fairly straightforward undertaking, but it's proven to be one HIPAA-covered entities and business associates frequently forgo -- much to their chagrin down the road, when they're notifying individuals of a privacy breach involving unencrypted personal data.

The Cleveland Clinic's annual Medical Innovation Summit got under way at the new Global Center for Health Innovation on Oct. 15. Cleveland Clinic CIO C. Martin Harris spoke about how the health system stays nimble on the innovation front.

The Department of Veterans Affairs continues to be one of the biggest offenders of HIPAA privacy and security rules and has reported egregious breaches in recent years, affecting millions of veterans and active service members.

Though he no longer has authority over meaningful use regulations, former ONC chief Farzad Mostashari, MD, said that due to the nature of the federal regulatory process, it would be difficult to introduce more flexibility for complying with the Stage 2 rules.

UNC Health Care is using IBM big data analytics to help hospital workers reduce costly and preventable readmissions, decrease mortality rates and improve patient care.

A Tennessee-based healthcare provider is notifying thousands of patients that their protected health information has been compromised following a privacy breach due to unencryption. The incident has prompted the hospital to move its records to an encrypted cloud-based server.

Healthcare organizations with long-established electronic health records run the risk of "note bloat" and compromised patient safety unless they standardize physician documentation procedures and limit the amount of cutting-and-pasting doctors have to do, attendees of CHIME's Fall CIO Forum heard at a session on Oct. 9.

While physicians recognize the benefits of electronic health records, they also complain that many systems deployed nowadays are cumbersome to use and often act as obstacles to quality care, according to a new report from RAND Corporation.

HIMSS CEO H. Stephen Lieber spoke about the promise of health IT and collaboration Oct. 8 at the opening of the Global Center for Health Innovation in Cleveland, an initiative of local government, local healthcare providers, nonprofit organizations and health IT vendors that has been 10 years in the making.