Healthcare IT Update

Are government regs blocking our way to becoming ‘meaningful users’?

Electronically share information! But be sure to protect it! Providers are caught between two competing federal initiatives, according to the latest General Accounting Office study, and security concerns over PHI might actually be holding them back from achieving better of quality of care.

As required by the HITECH Act, the GAO released a study on Feb. 17, 2010 titled “Health Care Entities’ Reported Disclosure Practices and Effects on Quality of Care.”

With the goal of describing how health care entities are disclosing PHI for the purposes of treatment as well as how sharing PHI is affecting quality of care, from May 2009 until the present, the GAO studied more than 60 operational health information exchanges (HIEs) and a selection of each of the exchanges’ participating providers, according to a GAO summary of…