Proponents of a $50 million pilot project that developed a paperless medical records system in three Massachusetts communities are hoping legislators will help continue and expand the program.
The initial pilot funding, pledged by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, will last through the end of 2008. State Senate President Therese Murray has included $25 million in funding to begin expanding the program statewide in an effort to control healthcare costs.
A high-fidelity mannequin will be used by students at Reading (PA)Hospital School of Health Sciences to hone their pediatrics techniques. "Students seem to enjoy learning by doing. And adding the simulation to the clinical is just a huge benefit," said Debbie Rahn, RN, director of the school's nursing program.
The owner of a Boca Raton, FL-based medical imaging center chain has agreed to pay $7 million to settle a healthcare fraud lawsuit. The suit charged that the center billed for CT scans that were never performed and offered payments to doctors to refer patients to its facilities. Medicare and insurers pay as much as $16 billion annually for unnecessary imaging tests ordered by doctors who profit from them, according to estimates from the American College of Radiology.
MIAMI— Computer files holding confidential health and financial information on more than 2.1 million patients at University of Miami health facilities since 1999 were stolen from a storage company contracted to secure the records. UM officials say they believe it is unlikely that the thieves will be able to access the files because of the "complex and proprietary format in which they are written."
"Even though I am confident that our patients’ data is safe, we felt that in the best interest of the physician-patient relationship we should be transparent in this matter,” says Pascal J. Goldschmidt, MD, senior vice president for medical affairs and dean of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Patients of a UM physician or a UM facility since Jan. 1, 1999, are likely included on the tapes. The data includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, or health information.
The university will be notifying by mail the 47,000 patients whose data may have included credit card or other financial information regarding bill payment. The box of computer records was stolen on March 17 from a van parked in downtown Coral Gables.
UM hired Terremark Worldwide, a computer security company, to determine the feasibility of accessing and extracting data from a similar set of back-up tapes. "For more than a week my team devised a number of methods to extract readable data from the tapes," says Christopher Day, senior vice president of the Secure Information Services group at Terremark. "Because of the highly proprietary compression and encoding used in writing the tapes, we were unable to extract any usable data." Day says that even if a thief had a copy of the same software used to write the tapes, "it would require certain key data which is not stored on the tapes before the software would make the data readable."
Alan Brill, senior managing director at Kroll Ontrack, a data recovery firm hired by UM to review the theft, says it’s "not impossible to access the data.” But he quickly added "in this case there are many barriers that stand between a thief and being able to actually get usable data from the tapes.”
—John Commins
Florida budget restraints have slowed development of an electronic system, leaving regional organizations to fend for themselves. After a push to offer grants totaling $9 million was killed, Rep. Denise Grimsley returned with a bill providing matching grants and no-interest loans to help develop a statewide health information exchange. The bill was approved 109-0 by the House, but it has not been funded.
Two researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient information. The authors are longtime proponents of the benefits of electronic patient records, but their concern is that the medical profession and policy makers have not begun to grapple with the implications of large companies becoming the hosts for vast stores of patient information. The arrival of corporate entrants into health records promises to bring "a seismic change" in the control and stewardship of patient information, according to their research.