Celebrity or not, HIPAA applies
Posted 10 October, 2007 in news
Actor George Clooney was admitted last month to the the Palisades Medical Center after a motorcycle accident. The temptation to look at Mr. Clooney’s medical file was just too much a couple dozen unauthorized employees to withstand. 27 people looked. 27 people are now suspended for a month without pay according to CNN.com. Sadly, the impetus for the investigation was not that they viewed Clooney’s records without cause, but that they leaked information to the press… HIPAA, it’s got (some) teeth now.
HealthVault: Microsoft Insecurity
Posted 4 October, 2007 in news
Microsoft, the megalithic, oft-hated vendor of only marginally-useful software, announced today in the Wall Street Journal that it would be offering free personal health records on the Web via its HealthVault system. Why *anyone* would trust the likes of Microsoft with their health information is beyond my comprehension. Still, proving once again that CEOs continue to make technology decisions instead of CIOs, Microsoft managed to signup an impressive roster of partners, including: American Heart Association, Johnson & Johnson LifeScan, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and MedStar Health, a network of seven hospitals in the Baltimore-Washington region.
On the upside, they did get the permissions model right, “Its privacy controls, the company said, are set entirely by the individual, including what information goes in and who gets to see it.” That said, the WSJ article goes on to mention that the data, stripped of some identifiers, will be data mined by third parties.
The news of this launch prompted a Slashdot reader to quip, “[this brings a] whole new meaning [to the blue screen of death.]
Would you trust Microsoft with your personal medical information?!?
How good is your hospital? (JCAHO CMS to the rescue!)
Posted 10 July, 2007 in EHRs, news, solutions
We’ve talked before about the importance of universal metrics and standards (e.g. IT security metrics (see: HIPAA intro and HIPAA enforcement) and EHR functionality.) Well, now that you have patient encounter data safely in your hosted EHR database, you’ll need some way to measure how well the medical practitioners are doing their jobs.
Enter JCAHO*– Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services– CMS (I know, they forgot an M in there…)
Those two organizations have identified “core measures” which they use 1. to determine JCAHO accreditation and 2. to determine if the hospital gets government money (Medicare & Medicaid).
An example, please!
A patient is admitted to the ER who has suffered a heart attack. JCAHO/CMS core measure AMI-1 states that the patient needs to be administered aspirin within 24 hours. There are five main categories of core measures with over thirty sub-measures. Running through your encounters manually to check against core measures would quickly become exhausting.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your EHR program could analyze your EHR encounter data and produce handy reports which show your JCAHO/CMS compliance levels? Well, there is at least one EHR vendor whose product now does that: RemedyMD’s OutcomeTrack. You can now even test drive their core measures analysis tool for free online (registration required).
If JCAHO accreditation is in the present or future of your hospital or practice, be sure that your EHR supports JCAHO/CMS reporting. If not, switch to an EHR vendor who does!
* The Joint Commission, an independent, not-for-profit organization, is the nation’s predominant standards-setting and accrediting body in health care. JCAHO is committed to improving healthcare nationwide and it evaluates medical facility compliance based on a focused set of “requirements” that are long known as essential to the delivery of good patient care.A JCAHO certification is considered the gold seal of approval and current law says hospitals accredited by JCAHO are automatically eligible for Medicare reimbursement.
The JCAHO web site can be found at www.jcaho.org (which is an alias for http://www.jointcommission.org/ )
Why healthcare IT should matter to you
Posted 8 July, 2007 in healthcare it benefits, news
QuadraMed (a Medical billing company) published a list of ten reasons why consumers should care about health information technology. I was happy to see such a list and I’ve included a few of their reasons below:
Health information technology:
- improves the quality of care
- prevents some medical errors
- empowers consumers to make smarter healthcare decisions.
- saves consumers money.
- decreases billing errors.
- is critical in the event of a nation-wide emergency.
- increases accountability from providers.
You can see the full list here
