Editor’s Note: D’Arcy Guerin Gue is a co-founder of Phoenix, with over 25 years of experience in executive leadership, strategic planning, IT services, knowledge leadership, and industry relations — with a special focus on patient engagement and federal compliance issues. She currently serves as the Director of Industry Relations at Phoenix Health Systems, a division of Medsphere SystemsYesterday, the Children’s National Medical Center announced yet another major hospital breach, this one
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Why Healthcare Must Never Be Allowed To Become A System
The Merriam-Webster dictionary has many definitions for the term system, but the most straightforward, and arguably the most applicable to our health care conversation is “a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole”. The common wisdom is that our health care system is broken and hence our government is vigorously attempting to fix it for us through legislation, reformation and transformation. We usually work ourselves into a frenzy arguing how the government
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Should Hospitals Consider Getting Cybercrime Insurance?
Naturally, most of what you hear from healthcare IT companies about their products is going to be upbeat, designed to create a sense of potential and promise. I mean, I can easily extol the virtues of the company I lead and the products and services we sell.But if I’m responsible and realistic, I also need to call attention to the challenges healthcare IT can create on the path to improved care. Without doubt, any information technology that creates, maintains, or transmits electronic patient
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Comprehensive Primary Care Plus Model: Why Risk Is the New Compassion
The most powerful persuasion tool in enlightened human society is language. The most powerful manipulation tool in any human society is language. Whereas in ancient times the pen was considered mightier than the sword, now the keyboard can be said to be mightier than any weapon of mass destruction, and nobody is mightier than the government of these United States. When our government wanted to strip citizens of privacy, it passed the Patriot act, because no one could oppose patriotism after
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Why Digital Health Growth Will Come From Clinically-Tested, Consumer-Facing, Interoperable Products
Editor's Note: Ingrid Oakley-Girvan, Ph.D., M.P.H. is an epidemiologist trained at Stanford. She is the VP of Strategy at Medable, a Palo Alto-based health platform start-up.A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) finds that many health apps may be sharing patients’ health data without their knowledge. Four-fifths of 211 diabetes apps examined did not have privacy policies. And in January 2016, Fitbit was slapped with a class-action lawsuit alleging that its
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Data Breaches: Moving Security Perimeter Back to Server Level
Editor's Note: Jon Senger is the CTO of Vertiscale . He writes frequently on the on the topic of HIPAA compliance and the role of MSPs in healthcare security.The leading cause of data breach incidents in healthcare facilities is lost or stolen end-user devices, including laptops and tablets. Such breaches have led to six figure fines for HIPAA violations in some cases, and with the stepped up enforcement coming in 2016 promised by the Department of Health and Human Services, we can expect to
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Can Middleware Replace HIEs and Solve EHR Interoperability?
Editor's Note: Dr. Donald Voltz is a board-certified anesthesiologist, researcher, medical educator, and entrepreneur. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is once again asking the health care community for its thoughts on establishing metrics to determine if or to the extent to which electronic health records are interoperable. The push to achieve interoperability is in response to last year’s mandate by Congress, contained in the Medicare Access and
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ACA Exchanges: 3 Keys to Sustainability
Editor’s Note: Chris Althoff and Larry Briski are partners at Invoyent, a healthcare IT company focused on software implementations for hospital systems and the insurance industry.ACA exchanges. Is sustainable business to be found in the new marketplace? With industry powerhouses like UnitedHealth and several Blues reporting major challenges, the long-term viability of the healthcare exchanges is in question.The U.S. government needs to take steps to improve market viability, like closing
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Healthcare Lessons from Facebook: Connecting Your Enterprise with Social Networking Tech
Editor's Note: Andy Aroditis is CEO and founder of NextGate, ranked No.1 in KLAS for enterprise master patient index (EMPI). Users of Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media applications are often amazed by how omniscient the technology seems to be. How do a bunch of algorithms know, out of billions of users, who you might consider a friend, or which videos you should consider watching just because you liked “The Dark Knight”?A big part of the answer is a core social media technology that
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Why We Cannot Dilute the Doctor in this New Era of Digital Health
Simply put, we cannot dilute the doctor over and over again, until there is no visible trace of human physicians in our digital health brew of healthcare. For decades and decades we have been counting the number of doctors in America. For decades and decades we have been coming up short compared to other developed nations, and some less developed ones as well. A poorly educated person may be tempted to suggest that we should “make” more doctors. After all, there is hardly a shortage of young
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