Healthcare IT Update

Vendors are targeting patients, too, promising easy management of statements.

Vendors must be coming at health care providers from every which way these days, promising the moon. One area that’s especially active is electronic billing. This is good news for providers on several fronts: They’ll have more choices for EHR adoption, and more patients pay their bills on time, according to one company.

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Researchers turn cell phones into medication sensors to monitor leukemia drug.

Health care providers are lining up for federal ARRA money, but they’ll mainly be hiring outside IT experts to set up programs and move the health system in the e-world. And private companies are racing to create the IT solutions that will win the providers that money – but not just with electronic records.

Disease management is a field that IT has been involved with for years already.

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Big schools, little schools and all kinds of lucky non-profits will get ARRA money.

Under the gun to get its “meaningful use” definition straight in order to meet the deadlines of October 2010 for hospitals and January 2011 for eligible providers, the Department of Health & Human Services is getting serious about HIT adoption, and the serious American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 money is starting to roll out.

In April 2010, the agency announced close to half a billion dollars in grants to schools and non-profits relating to the goal of establishing widespread and meaningful use of electronic health records by 2014.

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Use inspections to keep your security compliance plan in shape.

Does your security compliance program need a checkup? If so, now is the time to begin monitoring your staff so you can knock out compliance violations before they occur.

Read on to discover three steps that will help you get started:

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Study finds health IT investments worth $3B savings.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) may have shelled out billions of dollars to jump onto the health IT bandwagon, but a recent study claims the move has a big payback. As the private sector races to join the electronic health record zeitgeist, it might be worth studying how the VA has done it.

The VA system, called Vista (for Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture), yielded $3.09 billion in cumulative benefits net of investment costs by 2007, says a team from Center for IT Leadership at Partners Healthcare in Charlestown, MA, who authored the study.

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Interoperability promises to improve epidemiology and disease ID.

Take IT infrastructure away from public health laboratories (PHLs) and the country’s entire health system would be in big trouble.

A basic IT system will enable PHLs to effectively manage their laboratory data or electronically message laboratory test results, according to a recent article in Public Health Reports. PHLs provide a wide range of essential services, including disease surveillance and identification of infectious organisms associated with outbreaks of disease, explains the article’s author, Patina Zarcone, MPH, of the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) in Silver Spring, MD.

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Social media gets the nod from 59% of poll respondents…But don’t twit any advice.

Twitter will be an essential tool for physicians in the future. Fifty-nine percent of doctors believe the social media site will influence the world of medical practice in a huge way, according to a recent poll conducted by Case Western University in Cleveland, OH.

The ubiquitous social networking site is now popular among doctors, who use it as a way to interact with patients and other media professionals. However, doctors rarely give out medical advice in Twitter. Read on to find out more about whether to tweet or not.

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Stop unauthorized PHI disclosures before they start with ‘RBAC.’

If you don’t limit the amount of confidential data your staff can access, how can you ensure that unauthorized disclosures of medical information don’t occur, in violation of HIPAA? One way is to implement a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model to determine who has access to your organization’s medical data files.

We’ll show you how to get started.

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Do providers think consumers/patients will muck up the EHR adoption process?

As if the process weren’t complicated enough, the committee that advises the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is making a special effort to involve patients – also known as “consumers” of health care – and their families in the development of the definition of “meaningful use” in regs to be issued under HITECH.

Read on to find out why consumer groups think it’s doctors who are mucking up the process.

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Question: Does the HHS Office of Civil Rights verify the complaints it gets concerning breaches of private health information in alleged violation of HIPAA’s privacy or security rules before launching an investigation? As a covered entity, we’re concerned that someone might decide to use the breach reporting system on OCR’s web site to make totally unfounded complaints and harass our organization.

Read on for the answer, straight from the OCR’s mouth…

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