The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services intends to take a bigger bite out of fraud and abuse by strengthening its monitoring and analytics capabilities to prevent and detect suspicious activities. CMS will conduct enrollment and medical claims analytics using cutting-edge methods to keep the bad actors out of Medicare, share that information with Medicaid, and prevent the payment of fraudulent claims instead of chasing it down afterwards, said Peter Budetti, MD, CMS deputy administrator for program integrity. "This is the model for how the system is being put into place for Medicare and where we are going over time in Medicaid," he said Nov. 9 at the National Medicare RAC Summit.
Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national health IT coordinator, said that agencies in the Health and Human Services Department will work closely to craft a surveillance and action plan to keep patients safer through health IT, and it will be done sooner than called for by the Institute of Medicine. An IOM report published this week directed ONC as the office that oversees health IT to complete its plan within 12 months. "We appreciate the IOM's recommendations in making sure that we really do have a coherent structure for reporting, analyzing and acting on the information about EHR-related safety incidents," he said at the Nov. 9 meeting of the advisory Health IT Policy Committee.
Seven states and 11 health IT vendors have banded together to support a set of technical specifications to standardize health data sharing among healthcare providers, health information exchanges, and other parties. A bigger vision being eyed by the group is for the set of technical standards to gain support from other states and EHR and HIE product vendors so that the specs help in the country's loftier goal of health data exchange among healthcare providers nationwide. The specifications, available at www.interopwg.org, are the result of a workgroup originally launched in April by the New York eHealth Collaborative. Besides New York, the other members of the group include federally designated entities or HIEs in six other states--California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Oregon.
Electronic medical records, which the Obama administration would like to see widely used, are rarely encrypted so a data breach could be triggered by the simple theft of a laptop or misplaced thumb drive, a privacy expert told lawmakers on Wednesday. Regulations require healthcare providers to report data breaches unless the data lost had been encrypted. "We know from the statistics on breaches that have occurred since the notification provisions went into effect in 2009 that the healthcare industry appears to be rarely encrypting data," according to written testimony by Deven McGraw, of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Poorly designed, hard-to-use computerized health records are a threat to patient safety, and an independent agency should be set up to investigate injuries and deaths linked to health information technology, according to a federal study released Tuesday. The report by the Institute of Medicine comes as the government is spending billions of dollars in incentive payments to encourage doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health records. The Department of Health and Human Services requested the study, in response to concerns from some doctors and public health experts that the drive for digital records might bring a wave of technology-induced medical errors. The goal of moving from paper to computerized patient records is to improve patient care and curb healthcare costs.
Recognizing that electronic health records (EHRs) can and do cause medical errors, a group of EHR vendors has agreed to support a patient-safety organization's online system for reporting adverse events. The HIMSS EHR Association, an affiliate of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society that represents 44 EHR vendors, announced Monday that it is promoting the use of EHRevent, a year-old reporting system developed by the iHealth Alliance. The iHealth Alliance is a patient-safety organization convened by major U.S. medical societies, medical malpractice insurers, other patient-safety advocates, and liaisons from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.