Healthcare IT Update

Home Health Embraces Health Information Technology

So simple an HHA can do HIT? The joke goes that home health agencies are like cavemen among health care settings that resist HIT generally. But even though paperless home health agencies may seem like something out of a sci-fi novel, a new report reveals that more agencies are using technology to perform and track patient services than ever before. Statistics: More than 65 percent of all agencies now use electronic health records and 40 percent use point of service systems in the field, according to the National Association for Home Care and Hospice’s.  “The BlackBerry Report: The National State of the Home Care Industry Study.” NAHC and its co-sponsors conducted the study to gauge how often agencies use technology to deliver quality service, and to help agencies prepare for pending…

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Do Your Clinicians Resist HIT? Solve The Germy Device Problem for Them

How you can solve a big concern that might be making your doctors and nurses shun HIT. To health information geeks, technology is boundlessly capable of improving health care. Take infection control, for example. EHR can potentially make sense of seemingly disconnected data to help health care professionals spot outbreaks sooner. But while you’re envisioning the future of infection control, your clinicians are thinking about the here and now, writes skilled nursing facility expert Karen Lusky, BA, MSN, RN. When you think about it, those EMR devices you might be asking clinicians to carry from room to room are pretty gross. Good news: You and your health care organization’s clinicians can work together to take simple steps that prevent bacterial contamination from common HIT equipment.

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5 Steps Tame PHI Breaches

Down, Tiger. These 5 steps can help your health care organization avoid PHI gone wild, as well as those pesky PHI breach notifications that are your worst nightmare. 1. Limit access: Be selective about to whom you grant access — some practices build filters to prevent staff members from access records they don’t need to do their jobs. Example: In multi-specialty groups, consider blocking staff from looking at the patient records of other specialties, says attorney Michael C. Roach. It’s unlikely that some individuals, such as appointment schedulers, need to have access to the EHR at all. Alternatively, you could provide access to certain staff members in a limited data set format, suggests attorney Wayne Miller. Other ways to limit access include positioning terminals out of others’ line of vision and enforcing rules such as locking workstations upon getting up and not sharing passwords.…

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