Government & Policy
Medicare and Medicaid electronic health record payments are estimated to have blasted through $10.3 billion to a total of 180,200 physicians and hospitals through December since the program's inception. December's payments of $1.25 billion were driven by the largest amount of hospital payments for an individual month.
While the mobile health industry outpaces federal regulators, two experts weigh in on which apps should be subject to policy.
Electronic health records, mobile technologies, and analytics can forge a potent triptych to make sure that more medical errors get reported. Here's how that could work.
David Lareau, CEO of Medicomp, discusses successful single payer systems in other nations, how other countries view our healthcare system, and what it will take to bend the cost curve here in the U.S.
Deborah Peel, MD, was trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst and worked as a psychiatrist in Austin, Texas, for nearly three decades before becoming a privacy activist, founding the group Patient Privacy Rights in 2006 after being appalled by HIPAA's evolution into what she sees as a weak baseline for privacy and security.
In 2013, HIEs may be evolving in regions where there previously wasn't a huge need for information sharing. 2013 is also likely to bring a new focus on HIE interoperability, sustainability and clinical and business value.
The continuing saga around the deadline delay for states to decide whether they'll establish their own health insurance exchanges doesn't change the final upshot: All states are anticipated to have an online insurance marketplace, one way or another.
The delays may also make a federal/state partnership model for the exchange more palatable and a way out for unprepared states, at least in the initial years, according to an expert on state healthcare issues.
As more health organizations use cloud-based IT services, a patient privacy advocacy group is urging HHS to issue guidance on HIPAA and the cloud.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT wants to use EHR certification criteria to make it easier for physicians to report patient safety events. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will encourage providers to report adverse events to patient safety organizations, and ONC will propose certification requirements that, where appropriate, EHRs can report safety events in AHRQ's Common Formats.
IDC Health Insights group vice president is expecting that, by early March, the healthcare realm will see more HIPAA-compliant cloud services and an influx of organizations willing to sign HIPAA Business Associate Agreements.