Erin McCann
Boston has long proven itself a mecca for healthcare innovation, a hub of some of the best minds and most prestigious hospitals in the nation. And the 2014 Boston Children's Hospital Innovators' Showcase proved no exception.
Think the chances of getting a meaningful use audit are slim? Tell that to the folks who lost their job for doing it wrong, or folks at the four-hospital Scripps Health, who, all told, have undergone 11 meaningful use audits to date. Some say mock audits are indeed the right prescription.
Some 5,100 Kaiser Permanente patients were sent HIPAA breach notification letters after a KP research computer was found to have been infected with malicious software. Officials say the computer was infected with the malware for more than two and a half years before being discovered Feb. 12.
The brainchild of medical researcher, professor and self-made billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, NantHealth is aimed at solving the interoperability crisis and connecting the industry in the most powerful of ways -- a direct response of discontent with the federal government's EHR Incentive Program.
It took the Senate nearly five hours Mar. 31 to debate and approve a bill that would temporarily fix the SGR and also delay ICD-10 one year. The curious -- and disconcerting -- thing is, during that time not a single Senator made mention of the ICD-10 provision included in the bill, leaving many industry officials questioning: Do they even know what they just voted on? Either way, overall the folks in healthcare were not very happy.
It's not only federal HIPAA privacy and security violations that may end up costing industry groups a pretty penny. There's also state privacy laws to heed. Case in point is what recently transpired at Stanford Hospital and Clinics.
Here's another reason why those multi-million dollar electronic health record systems might be finally paying off, in terms of lives potentially saved. According to new research, EHRs can be used to predict the early stages of sepsis, which is responsible for killing some 210,000 people each year.
The 28-hospital Indian Health Service has failed a mock cyberattack conducted by HHS' Office of Inspector General after its computer network was discovered to have "high risk" vulnerabilities.
The surge in the number of hospitals and providers inking data exchange deals has resulted in corresponding market growth for health information exchange, according to a new industry report.
If you're in charge of a healthcare organization's data privacy and security, listen up. You now have a new, valuable resource at your fingertips.