The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has published research that aims to help providers and professionals better understand several high-impact services that can sustain health information exchange organizations. The research is meant to help professionals who are putting in place health information exchange (HIE) with policy, technical and business-related skills related to query-based exchange, push notification and subscription services, provider directories, master data management and consumer engagement.
The advanced use of electronic health records is starting to accelerate in hospitals, mainly because of the government's EHR incentive program, concludes a new analysis of HIMSS Analytics' Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) scale. The EMRAM scale is an eight-stage model that indicates where hospitals stand on the EHR adoption curve. A survey by HIMSS Analytics, the research arm of the Health Information Management and Systems Society, indicates that during the five quarters ended in September 2012, the number of U.S. acute care hospitals achieving EMRAM stage 5 or 6 increased by more than 80%; the number of facilities in stage 7 rose 63%.
Changes coming to the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rule mean added administrative work, and they could mean additional reporting, said Lisa Sotto, head of Hunton & Williams' global privacy and data security practice in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced what Office of Civil Rights (OCR) director Leon Rodriguez called "sweeping changes" to HIPAA that will strengthen the OCR's ability to enforce HIPAA.
A former Florida Hospital Celebration emergency department registration clerk has been sentenced for selling patient information he improperly accessed in a breach of thousands of patient records. Dale Munroe II was sentenced on Jan. 18 to 12 months and one day in federal prison. He had been accused of inappropriately accessing 760,000 electronic health records and then stealing and selling information about 12,000 motor vehicle accident patients to a co-conspirator, who used the data to solicit legal and chiropractic business.
Remember how Obamacare was going to "Bend the cost curve" for health care spending? That was OMB director Peter Orszag, back when Obamacare was being debated. There were a number of theories about how it would accomplish this. There were electronic medical records, which would cut down paperwork and medical errors. And ACOs, which would finally bring America to the promised land of "bundled payments", which was supposed to radically change treatment incentives. Medicare pilot projects were going to open up new, more efficient ways to do things. If all those failed, the legislation contained an Independent Payment Advisory Board which will recommend a panel of automatic cuts unless health care cost inflation stays below a fairly low target level.
A new study suggests that "e-visits" to health-care providers for sinus infections and urinary tract infections (UTIs) may be cheaper than in-person office visits and similarly effective. For e-visits, patients fill out online forms about their symptoms and a doctor or nurse gets back to them within a few hours with treatment advice. In the study, the main difference between e-visits and office visits was that patients who received their care online were prescribed more antibiotics, a finding that could be concerning but is hard to interpret on its own, researchers said.