HIPAA
See the following -
How Medical Device Manufacturers Inject Copyright Into Treatments
Arguments for proprietary data hoarding have been aired in the computer movement for decades, and have been decisively overturned by open source advocates and security experts. The real question is why any patient should be denied access to data that can improve his quality of life and chances of survival. In an age where "patient activation" and "Quantified Self" are buzzwords uttered throughout the medical industry, it is inconceivable that it could tolerate the present situation.
IBM Donates Technology for Open Source Innovation
IBM announced Monday that it will donate a portion of its Blue Spruce Project code to the Dojo Foundation’s Open Cooperative Web Framework (OpenCoweb), helping enable health IT advancements on several fronts. Read More »
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Liberated Health Data A Catalyst to Innovation
The chief technology officer for HHS said efforts to liberate health records and data within the federal space will spur innovation in the public and private sectors that improves Americans' health and health care. Read More »
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Medical Imaging in the Cloud: A Conversation About eMix
Over the past few weeks I've been talking to staff at DR Systems about medical imaging in the cloud. DR Systems boasts of offering the first cloud solution for sharing medical images, called eMix. Read More »
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ONC Gets It Mostly Right with TEFCA 2.0
On April 17, 2019 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released the second draft of its Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) for comment. The initial version was released more than a year ago in January 2018 (see my original blog). As before, this is in response to a requirement imposed by Congress in the 21 Century Cures Act. After a somewhat lengthy (but well written) introduction, the document contains three parts (compared to just two parts the first time around)...
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Open Source Goes Corporate: Can Open Healthcare Be Far Behind?
If you aren't in IT, you may have missed the news that IBM is acquiring Red Hat, a leader in the open source Linux movement, or that, a couple days prior, Microsoft closed on its acquisition of GitHub, a leader in open source software development. Earlier this year Salesforce acquired Mulesoft, and Cloudera and Hortonworks merged; all were other open source leaders. I must confess, I had never heard of some of these companies, but I'm starting to believe what MarketWatch said following the IBM announcement: "open source has truly arrived." What exactly that means, especially for healthcare, I'm not sure, but it's worth exploring. IBM is paying $34b for Red Hat.
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Patients Get Access to Lab Results, Under New Proposal
Patients in Pennsylvania — as they already can in New Jersey and Delaware — could get results directly from a laboratory instead of waiting for a delivery from a doctor, under a proposal to change federal law announced Monday by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Read More »
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Providers, vendors both to blame for information blocking
Most information blocking in healthcare is "beyond the current reach" of federal agencies to detect, investigate and address, according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's report to Congress published Friday. Read More »
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Radiologist Sues Hospital for 'Silencing' His Patient Safety Concerns
University of Iowa radiologist Malik Juweid filed a lawsuit earlier this month charging the hospital is trying to silence his complaints that the facility performs unnecessary PET and CT scans, particularly on children. He also seeks unspecified damages for racial discrimination and defamation. Read More »
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Signatures are No Longer Required for Credit Card Transactions...How Come Most Medical Records Exchanges Still Require Fax Machines?
If you live in the U.S., you've probably had the experience of paying for a meal using a credit card. The server takes your card, disappears to somewhere in the back, does something with it that you can't see, and returns with your card, along with two paper receipts, one of which you need to sign. Everything that happens to me, I think, what is this, the 1960's?As of last week, the major credit card companies -- American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa -- are no longer requiring that signature. As a Mastercard person told CNET, "It is the right time to eliminate an antiquated practice."
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Sqrrl Raises $2 Million For Secure, Scalable Big Data Technology Originally Developed At NSA
Sqrrl, a big data startup that came out of development at the National Security Agency (NSA), has raised $2 million in seed funding from Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture. Read More »
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The Imminent Industry-Association War Over ICD-10
The stage is set for a war over U.S. adoption of ICD-10. Indeed, such a fight could pit industry associations that stand to profit from the code set against those representing the providers who have to actually implement and pay for the ICD-10 conversion.
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The Surprisingly Small Percentage Health Orgs Spend on Data Security
Three percent or less. That’s how much of their overall IT budgets half the respondents to a HIMSS survey allocate to information security – and that’s up from last year. The fourth annual HIMSS Security Survey, in fact, found that 53 percent of respondents spend less than 3 percent, with a portion of those spending less than 1 percent. Read More »
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The Utopia of Unique Patient Identifiers
The subject of Unique Patient Identifiers pops up with clockwork regularity in the healthcare discourse. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) titled Has the Time Come for a Unique Patient Identifier for the U.S.? points out that HIPAA initially mandated patient identifiers. Reason prevailed and the requirement was abandoned. The article goes on to list, correctly, all the issues related to duplicates and split records and their dire consequence from financial costs to potential loss of life. Just a few short years ago the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) issued a petition calling for unique patient identifiers citing much of the same issues and making a proposal for a voluntary solution. That effort also failed to get much traction either. While the problems cited are very real, it is not at all clear how a unique identifier would solve the problem, in spite of the very bold claims.
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Updated OIG 2015 work plan adds EHR issues under review
The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General continues to refine its scrutiny of electronic health records, adding a new focus area in an update to its work plan, but deleting several older items previously under review. The 2015 update says that for the first time, OIG will review the use of EHRs by accountable care organizations to coordinate care.
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