Healthcare IT Update

Patients Don’t Trust EHR, Survey Says

Experts emphasize balance between patient care and privacy. Personal health data is less secure now than it was a year ago, according to a recent online survey by nCircle, an IT solutions provider. Almost half of the 257 people who participated in the survey said they are anxious about the fact that multiple partners of their health care providers (i.e., such as EHR vendors and insurers) have access to personal electronic information — increasing the risk of security breaches.

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iPad Offers Pros and Cons for EHR Adoption

Image copyright Apple We noted last week that there’s a lot of hype swirling around Apple’s release of the iPad — an electronic tablet device that many in the health care technology field see as a revolutionary new tool that will speed the adoption of electronic health records. But other writers and experts are not so sure, and there will certainly be a period of testing and caution before the health care industry embraces new EHR tools of which the iPad is just one example. Read on to find out whether the iPad will actually live up to the hype or just be another fancy toy that will give health care workers and patients a bigger screen to play Tetris on. Here are some key specs of…

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Hospitals Find New HIT Issues in OIG’s 2010 Work Plan

Watch out. If your hospital breaches 1,000 records, you face a whopping $282,000 fine. Hospitals that read the HHS OIG’s 2010 Work Plan carefully will find an important clue about how to handle health information technology in the future. And it’s buried in a very real and present threat, so read on to find out how to not only avoid penalties from CMS in the present but also prepare for ARRA’s “meaningful use” requirement, which CMS announced on Dec. 30 will be tied to quality data. Reporting quality data and portable device compliance under HIPAA are two hot areas for hospitals in 2010, according to Jim Sheldon-Dean, director of compliance services at Lewis Creek Systems, who gave a recent audio presentation titled “OIG 2010 Work Plan for Hospitals.” And that makes sense, given CMS’s…

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Remote Workers? Protect PHI With This Sample Document

Don’t have a policy for employees who work with PHI? We’ve got what you need to write one quickly. Your practice has tough decisions to make when allowing employees to handle patients’ private health information (PHI) while working from offsite locations. You may require encryption, you may prohibit them from working on their personal laptops when dealing with PHI, or you may even only allow remote work when it’s done for emergency reasons. But no matter what, you need to communicate your privacy expectations to your employees. Consider this sample document as a guide, contributed by Glenn Allen, information security director with Fairview Health Services in Minneapolis, Minn:

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Got Remote Employees? Get These PHI Safeguards

Health system puts over a million records at risk. If you’ve been putting privacy compliance on the back burner, it’s time to bring it up front again. Investigators are paying attention, and you should, too. Last year, for example, officials of a health system in Connecticut announced that an unencrypted hard drive with about 1.5 million patients’ information on it was stolen, potentially subjecting that protected health information (PHI) to abuse. Stories like this are certainly eyecatching — and add to that the new focus in privacy with the introduction of the HITECH act — and you can be sure that patient privacy is gearing up to take center stage. And with employees taking work home and bringing laptops or cell phones with them to the office, you should be sure that your office’s security is tight. Next: Practical encryption tips …

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Sending PHI Via Email? How to Make Sure It Stays Safe

Look at alternatives to encryption when you deem them necessary. An email that contains a patient’s protected health information (PHI) can be completely harmless —unless it falls into the wrong hands. But fortunately, there are a few ways that you can head off potential email security breaches. Although many health care providers have started encrypting their emails, you aren’t specifically required to do so yet. As the interim final rule published in the Aug. 24 Federal Register indicates, that “a covered entity may be in compliance with the [HIPAA] Security Rule even if it reasonably decides not to encrypt electronic PHI and instead uses a comparable method to safeguard the information.” Several readers have inquired what might constitute a “comparable method,” and some even asked why this is required in the first place. And we’ve got your answers here …

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