The federal healthcare breach notification rule requires HIPAA covered entities-comprising providers, insurers and vendors who must comply with HIPAA transaction sets-to report breaches of protected health information affecting 500 or more individuals to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights. OCR posts the breaches to a public Web site. And there have been a lot of postings: by mid-June, 288 listings had filled what is called the "Wall of Shame" in just an 18-month period. Health Data Management contacted numerous organizations that had suffered a data breach, hoping to find one that would share its experiences about dealing with and recovering from a major breach. Only one responded, and that was to say it declined to comment. Susan McAndrew, deputy director for health information privacy at OCR, believes the reluctance is a missed opportunity.
For some of the states that managed to pass exchange bills this year, the fight over implementing health reform is far from over. Showing that no battle is too small when it comes to health care reform, patient advocates are worried about the insurance industry influencing governance boards overseeing the health exchanges. That's because the governance boards could be tapped to handle a lot of the heavy lifting on key policy questions, such as which health plans can sell on the exchanges and how to finance the online insurance marketplace and prevent conflicts of interest. Exchange governance boards will be busy between now and January 2013, when Health and Human Services must determine whether a state's exchange passes muster. Building an exchange -- an online marketplace where consumers can shop and compare health plans -- will require information technology expertise, as well as an intimate understanding of how insurance markets operate. Ultimately, the boards will be responsible for striking the right balance between meeting consumer needs and supporting viable insurance marketplaces for the 24 million projected to enroll in exchanges by the end of the decade.
Business sustainability continues to be among the biggest challenges for most health information exchanges, even as new HIEs are starting up and existing ones are figuring out ways to overcome technical and other various hurdles, according to a new report from eHealth Initiative. The number of HIEs in the U.S. grew 9% in 2011 to 255 from 234 in 2010, according to a recently released annual report by eHealth Initiative, an independent non-profit membership organization that advocates for the use of health IT and studies HIE trends. The number of HIEs tallied by eHI reflects 10 initiatives shutting down or consolidating over the last year, and 46 new initiatives participating in the eHI survey. eHI has been conducting its Report On Health Information Exchanges studies since 2004, when there were only a few dozen HIE initiatives. That was prior to the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's $27 billion HITECH Act, which included more than $564 million in funding to help states launch or expand HIEs.
Twitter, Facebook, and online communities can help healthcare organizations, emergency personnel, and government agencies better prepare for and respond to emergencies, so it's a good idea to integrate these technologies into planning, according to three public-health professionals. "Clearly, social media are changing the way people communicate not only in their day-to-day lives, but also during disasters that threaten public health. Engaging with and using emerging social media may well place the emergency-management community, including medical and public health professionals, in a better position to respond to disasters," Raina M. Merchant, MD, Stacy Elmer, and Nicole Lurie, MD, of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response wrote in a New England Journal of Medicine commentary.
The federal incentive program for Meaningful Use of electronic health records seems to be having its desired early effect by spurring healthcare organizations to adopt more than just basic EHRs, according to a new study. And many hospitals are making plans to spend more on other forms of IT in the next few years, suggesting that EHRs are becoming integral to the overall organizational strategy. "In hindsight, 2010 proved to be the year organizations ramped up their approach to meet the first stage of the [Meaningful Use] criteria," reads the report, Essentials of the U.S. Hospital IT Market, 6th Edition, a publication of HIMSS Analytics. In its survey of hospitals and integrated delivery networks nationwide, the research arm of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society found that spending on revenue cycle management (RCM), enterprise data warehousing, and associated areas such as business intelligence will continue growing for at least the next five years.
Allies of the medical device industry are waging an extraordinary campaign in Washington to discredit a coming report by one of the country's pre-eminent scientific groups that examines possible new regulations on the industry. The scientific group, the Institute of Medicine, is scheduled to release a report on Friday that could propose a tougher approval process for a wide range of devices like hip implants, hospital pumps and external heart defibrillators. The report, commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration, comes after several well-publicized recalls in recent years of devices that have failed in thousands of patients, causing numerous injuries. But a business group and others have taken the highly unusual step of making a pre-emptive strike, arguing that the report is biased. That attack began even before the study panel finished its review, and has intensified in recent weeks.