Cerner Corp. and a small Kansas hospital have become embroiled in a dispute over failed attempts to install an electronic medical records system. Girard Medical Center, a critical-access hospital northwest of Pittsburg, Kan., had sued the North Kansas City-based supplier of information technology to hospitals, doctors and others in healthcare. Their quarrel is now in arbitration under an order issued in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan. The hospital said Cerner also failed to deliver the system in time to qualify Girard for federal incentive payments it needed to make the $2.9 million project affordable.
Initiating collaborative relationships is the key to improved quality, most healthcare leaders say. Teamwork is an emerging focus, with nearly three-quarters (72%) of those surveyed entering collaborative care relationships. At the same time, healthcare leaders are reluctant to engage in shared savings programs as a risk-sharing cost-reduction tactic: 63% say they have no plans for such programs, which are a foundation of the evolving accountable care organization models.
There's a reason Epic Systems Corp. keeps building offices: The Verona electronic medical records company keeps signing major clients. As Epic hurtles toward the top, some are questioning whether the type of technology Epic and its rivals offer may be stifling innovation in healthcare and keeping medical costs high. On the down side, customers have complained to KLAS about Epic's "young, inexperienced staff with limited health care knowledge and ... up-front cost of the system is seen as prohibitively high for health systems with fewer financial resources." Epic does not make announcements about the clients it lands. It also doesn't disclose the cost of its systems. But recent stories in campus publications remove some of the mystery.
Neither the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) nor California's Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA) do enough to address the privacy and security of patients' health information. That's the conclusion of the Consumers Union and the Center for Democracy & Technology, as outlined in their recently released policy brief. Achieving the Right Balance: Privacy and Security Policies to Support Electronic Health Information Exchange observed that both HIPAA and CMIA are based on Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPs), a set of comprehensive guidelines that govern the way healthcare providers and related organizations collect, use, and safeguard personal information.
The Aravind Eye Hospital in South India, founded by Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy ("Dr. V") in 1976, is a group of hospitals and clinics renowned for performing hundreds of thousands of sight-restoring eye surgeries each year. Fans often suggest that Aravind's methodology could be applied to primary care, or that the model should be exported to the developed world. The "model," however, is not so easy to duplicate in part because it depends on hard-to-measure qualities that stump technocrats. At the Pacific Health Summit in London two weeks ago, where the theme was technology and affordability, I spoke with Aravind's chief medical officer, Dr. Rengaraj Venkatesh.
Alaska's Medicaid program has agreed to pay OCR $1.7 million over potential HIPAA Security Rule violations, OCR announced in a June 26 press release. The settlement marks the second largest to date for HIPAA violations, behind CVS Caremark's $2.25 agreement in 2009. It also marks OCR's first enforcement action against a state agency. OCR reported that Alaska's Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS), the state Medicaid agency, did not have adequate policies and procedures in place to safeguard PHI when a USB hard drive was stolen from an employee's vehicle.