Seeking to better align health IT standards with health information management practices, three industry groups joined forces for a new report aimed at speeding standards-based interoperability. HIMSS, AHIMA and IHE call Health IT Standards for Health Information Management Practices, a "first-of-its-kind" report that's meant to be a guide for those HIM and health IT professionals working to develop interoperability standards. It aims to enlighten standards developers about information management practices and show how to better align them with health information technology. It will also serve as a roadmap of sorts for the development of standards to support information governance, including efforts in the U.S. and abroad to ensure semantic, technical and functional interoperability among information systems.
De-identified information is excluded from the HIPAA Privacy Rule's definition of protected health information, permitting its use without patient authorization. However, information de-identified according to HIPAA provisions can be re-identified putting patient privacy at risk. So argues Latanya Sweeney, professor of government and technology in residence and director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University. Sweeney was famously able to show how the medical record of William Weld—then-governor of Massachusetts—could be re-identified using only his date of birth, gender and postal code. In addition, she also showed in a separate study that 87 percent of all Americans are uniquely identified based on only date of birth, sex, and ZIP code.
Nestled in the gently rolling hills of Verona, Wisconsin, a small Madison suburb, is the 1,000-acre "Intergalactic Headquarters" of Epic Systems, the multibillion-dollar company that claims its software manages medical records for 179 million Americans—or 56 percent of the country. Epic's HQ features a conference room tucked in a tree house. There's a Dungeons & Dragons-themed building with a moat and a replica drawbridge. One corridor is modeled to resemble a New York City subway car, complete with a statue of a homeless guy asleep on a bench. A group of Harry Potter-inspired office buildings dubbed the "Wizards Academy" is currently under construction.
Hospitals, facing growing pressure from insurers to cut costs, are taking an axe to their supply chains. New forms of payment triggered by the Affordable Care Act have threatened to reduce revenue for hospitals, prompting providers to add services and constrain costs. Many hope that technology long used in retail and other industries will help them cut inventory costs by millions of dollars. Up until last year, the team managing supplies for BJC HealthCare's network of 12 hospitals in Illinois and Missouri kept track of medical devices the old fashioned way: by counting them, said Marcia Howes, chief supply chain executive at the company. [Subscription Required]
Healthcare's cybersecurity ills are well-known, and a new study of enterprise secure software development shows just how far that sector lags behind other industries. The new Building Security in Maturity Model (BSIMM) study published today, BSIMM6, found healthcare organizations scored much lower than their counterparts in the financial services, independent software vendor, and consumer electronics industries, when it comes to internal software security programs and practices. BSIMM6 studied more than 100 enterprises including 10 firms in healthcare. Six of those healthcare firms--Aetna, ANDA, McKesson, The Advisory Board Company, Siemens and Zephyr Health--agreed to be named as part of the study, which is headed up by software security firm Cigital Inc. with the help of NetSuite.
When my doctor walks into the exam room, I want her to pay attention to me, not the computer. Not only is that what all patients want, but it's what doctors want, too. Yet doctors today are under pressure to feed the digital beasts. Health care's latest best-selling M.D. author, Bob Watcher, says that in a 10-hour shift a single doctor might record 4,000 clicks. Worse, much of this activity is routine census taking, driven by insurers and regulators who assume digitization makes it easy to gather statistical data, regardless of whether it contributes to the quality of care.