Anthony Brino
While the U.S. continues digitizing its healthcare industry, a huge challenge is arising: not only securing those systems but verifying identities. With a steady stream of HIPAA-covered data breaches continuing over the past few years, some argue that current identity security approaches just aren't adequate.
Leaders from 33 digital health companies in New York are calling on the legislature to fund the Statewide Health Information Network of New York, or SHIN-NY, just as the organization's connecting HIEs and information systems are starting to build a critical mass.
In efforts to guarantee patient access to their lab tests, the nation's largest pharmacies are now promising to adopt the Blue Button personal health record.
The ONC's Meaningful Use Workgroup will submit draft recommendations for Stage 3 of the Meaningful Use EHR Incentive Program on Feb. 14. So far, the workgroup has developed a number of ideas that have consensus, but clinical quality measures may not be as easy to include in digital systems as previously thought.
A health IT consultant described the "Tower of Babel"-eqsue barrier she encounters coordinating disparate EHR systems to a panel at the Health Innovation Day conference. William Check, CTO at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association responded: "What you just described could have been the cable industries. It's amazing the parallel here."
Health networks and physician practices have the most to gain from an interoperable ecosystem and, it follows, the most to lose if it doesn't go right. But one could argue that American patients and taxpayers stand to gain or lose just as much.
Blackford Middleton, MD, first came across the term "clinical decision support" in 1983. Today, Middleton continues his decades-long work on CDS and hoping the federal meaningful use program can help make clinical decision support systems more accessible, intelligent and interoperable.
Last October and November, as HealthCare.gov struggled to accommodate visitors and offer its promised user experience, HHS staff and contractors were, among other fixes, "adding server capacity" -- suggesting that the U.S. CTO's goals of technological innovation remain to be seen in health programs.
Maine may become the first state in the country to offer residents access to their personal health records via a health information exchange. The Maine HealthInfoNet plan is part of a federally-funded innovation project experimenting with a range of medical home, analytics and engagement strategies.
The Office of the National Coordinator is looking for a new certification director at perhaps the most critical point in the evolution of the federal health IT incentive program. The new deputy would assume the post just as rulemaking and certification work starts for the third phase of the meaningful use program.