Editor's Note: Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) gives administration officials five reasons to take more time before making final the Meaningful Use Stage 3 rule of the federal government’s program to require doctors and hospitals to create EHR systems.
Over the last 5 years, the taxpayers have spent $30 billion to encourage doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health records systems. The whole purpose of this program is to benefit patients, so that they and their health care providers
Read More
Can You Maintain HIPAA Consent While Using Email?
Editor's Note: Erik Kangas is the Presdient and CEO of LuxSci, a SaaS company specializing in security, privacy, HIPAA compliance, and all things email. He also consults on email best practices, secure web site architectures, and HIPAA compliance to organizations around the globe.
The way personal health information has been gathered, stored, and protected over the years has seen a great number of changes. Up until 1996, when Congress first passed the Health Insurance Portability and
Read More
How 3D Printing is Driving Innovation to Medical Specialties
Some have claimed that the advance of medical (and computer) technology is progressing at a rate faster than the human mind can assimilate. 3D printing is simply two-dimensional printing built upwards. The most exciting aspect of 3D printing involves is the promise of healthcare solutions so tailored to the individual, only “personalized medicine”—dependent on individual gene sequencing—can compete.
3D Printing in Orthopedics
3D printers emerged on the scene only to
Read More
De-Identification Standards Offer 1 Solution to the High Cost of Healthcare Data Breaches
Editor's Note: Dr. Khaled El Emam is the CEO of Privacy Analytics, a world-renowned expert in statistical de-identification and re-identification risk. He is one of only a handful of known individual experts in North America qualified to certify the anonymization of Protected Health Information under the HIPAA privacy law.
Between October 2009 and August 2015, 1,286 HIPAA-covered entities and business associates have reported data breaches involving more than 500 records, which have
Read More
Why EHR Data Blocking Is The Enemy of Collaboration
Note: Dr. Mark Crockett is the chief medical officer of Rise Health, a Best Doctors company. The company provides solutions to deliver the right care at the right time to the right patient.
Today’s healthcare headlines state the problem succinctly’: ‘EHR Data Blocking Hobbles HIT’; ‘EHR Data Blocking Still Rampant’ and more. Search ‘EHR data blocking’ on Google and you get 81,000 entries. Data blocking is clearly obstructing progress towards value-based care and is the enemy of
Read More
What Is The Future Impact of Population Health Management?
Editor's Note: Erdem Asma MSM, PMP is a healthcare executive with more than 15 years of healthcare technology implementations experience supporting business requirements for both HIS vendors and healthcare organizations globally.
“Awareness of a problem does not mean much, particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The term population health is how new medicine should be able to identify a population and predicting what
Read More
Health Plan Mergers: 5 Steps for Harvesting IT Integration Savings
Editor's Note: This post is written by Albert Ghafari, a founding partner and Bryan Komornik, a Senior Manager in the management consulting practice at Invoyent, a Chicago-based consulting firm dedicated to helping payer and software clients transform the healthcare industry by delivering clear, market-driven strategies that serve their customers and improve the lives of members.
The Aetna-Humana and Cigna-Anthem merger announcements represent a growing trend toward consolidation in
Read More
Is Accountability The Missing Element in Better Healthcare?
Editor’s Note: Irv Lichtenwald is president and CEO of Medsphere Systems Corporation, the solution provider for the OpenVista electronic health record. Prior to joining Medsphere, he served as CFO of Advent Software, a leading provider of investment management solutions. Between 1995 and 2003, Irv led Advent through three public stock offerings.
Who is accountable for the actions of Adam Lanza, the troubled young man who in December 2012 killed 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut?
He is, of
Read More
Why Non-Specific ICD-10 Codes Are a Non-Issue
A safe harbor or grace period that would allow the submission of “less specific” ICD-10 codes after the ICD-10 transition continues to be raised as a way to alleviate the burden of the transition on physicians. For example, HR 2247, the ICD-TEN Act, would prohibit Medicare from denying claims “due solely to the use of an unspecified or inaccurate subcode.” A letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) from several members of Congress recommends that CMS indicate “whether
Read More
Catholic Health’s CIO Talks Leveraging Health IT for Value-based Care
Editor's Note: Deloitte Insights for CIOs provides relevant research, fact-based analysis and pragmatic perspectives on the technology issues that matter most to CIOs and other executives with an interest in technology.
When it comes to disruptive forces, health care providers seem to have it all: evolving legal and regulatory requirements, unsustainable economics, challenging demographic shifts, industry consolidation, and fast-moving technology-driven change, among others. All of these
Read More
