HIPAA

See the following -

2012 Predictions: Big Data is King in Healthcare (Patient Privacy is its Jester)

Dr. Westby G. Fisher | Med City News | December 26, 2011

As the New Year begins, I suspect we will first see more of the same: more market consolidation with larger hospitals eating smaller, financially’strapped hospitals and doctors throwing in the towels of financial independence in favor of corporate employment or retirement. Read More »

5 Healthcare Data Governance Best Practices

Sunil Soares | Government Health IT | January 31, 2012

Information governance is the formulation of policy to optimize, secure, and leverage information as an enterprise asset by aligning the objectives of multiple functions. In our experience, information governance practitioners face critical challenges in explaining the value to the business.

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Accumulo: Why The World Needs Another NoSQL Database

Jeff Kelly | siliconangle.com | August 20, 2012

If you’ve been unable to keep up with all the competing NoSQL databases that have hit the market over the last several years, you’re not alone. To name just a few, there’s HBase, Cassandra, MongoDB, Riak, CouchDB, Redis, and Neo4J. To that list you can add Accumulo, an open source database originally developed at the National Security Agency... Read More »

Apixio Illuminates The Pain of Recording Patient Risk Factors (Part 2)

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPPA | October 28, 2016

The previous section of this article introduced Apixio’s analytics for payers in the Medicare Advantage program. Now we’ll step through how Apixio extracts relevant diagnostic data. Providers usually submit SOAP notes to the Apixio web site in the form of PDFs. This comes to me as a surprise, after hearing about the extravagant efforts that have gone into new CCDs and other formats such as the Blue Button project launched by the VA. Normally provided in an XML format, these documents claim to adhere to standards and offer a relatively gentle face to a computer program. In contrast, a PDF is one of the most challenging formats to parse: words and other characters are reduced to graphical symbols, while layout bears little relation to the human meaning of the data...

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Bridging Medicine's Electronic Gap

Staff | MD News | December 8, 2011

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 20% of seniors have five or more chronic conditions for which these patients visit an average of 13 separate providers and receive an average of 50 prescriptions. Given this statistic, how can the 13th physician safely and effectively treat a patient without the benefit of any prior medical information? Read More »

CES 2019 In Vegas to Feature Patient-Centric Open Health IT Innovations

CES is the world's gathering place for all those who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. It has served as the proving ground for innovators and breakthrough technologies for 50 years - the global stage where next-generation innovations are introduced to the marketplace. This year's conference has a health and wellness track as well as many health IT vendors in the exhibit. One of the most significant announcements will be the release of iBlueButton 8 by Humetrix. Blue Button is one of the core elements of the White House open source health IT strategy that we wrote about here. Humetrix has developed a mobile health platform and the latest version will be unveiled at the conference.

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CONNECT releases open-source HIE software

Editorial Staff | CMIO | September 8, 2011

For national and local health information exchanges (HIEs) running on the CONNECT platform, there’s a new version 3.2.1. CONNECT that uses Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) standards and governance to make sure that HIEs are compatible with other exchanges being established across the country. Read More »

Could ICD-10 have as big a financial impact as the mortgage crisis? Yes. Here's why.

Michael F. Arrigo | Government Health IT | October 17, 2011

U.S. National Healthcare Expenditures (NHE) are $2.7 trillion in 20111 and are forecasted to grow 34% in five years. This multi-trillion dollar economy will shift its reimbursement paradigm to ICD-102 in under 24 months. ICD-10 will introduce opportunities and risks to hospitals and health plans that may be equivalent to the $148.2 billion to $500 billion in losses3 to the U.S. Read More »

Direct Project Reaches Consensus on Trust Framework

David Kibbe | Government Health IT | October 3, 2011

On Friday September 22, 2011, members of the Direct Project Rules of the Road workgroup reached consensus on a key component of the trust framework necessary to make Direct exchange expand nationally and be available to more users. Read More »

EHR Implementation Still Costs Too Much

Nicole Lewis | InformationWeek | July 9, 2012

Hospitals have always had problems securing the initial down payment for electronic health record (EHR) implementation; a recently released poll from KPMG suggests that financing such projects remains an ongoing concern that promises to last throughout the implementation phase and beyond. Read More »

Fax Is Not a Machine, It Is a Technology

Once more I am listening to a presentation on interoperability. These always get a little uncomfortable - especially in the early going - because I can almost predict where the presenter will go horribly wrong and do a complete disservice to the audience (generally somewhere between slides 3 and 8). This time it was slide 6 where the speaker inserts stock picture of a decrepit old fax machine with paper cascading off a desk and onto the floor. This comes along with the typical lecture on everything that is wrong with "fax". With the lemmings in the audience nodding/snickering along, the speaker proceeds to misinform and mislead the group. Cringe-worthy really. What's misleading? Pretty much everything he says.

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Fax Technologies Take Center Stage at HIMSS19 Exhibition

One of the most surprising developments at HIMSS19 is the large number of companies exhibiting their Fax Technologies. Long derided by reporters, health IT consultants, and EHR vendors, fax technologies have been growing in leaps and bounds while EHRs continue to fail to deliver interoperability. Just a couple of years ago faxes were used in around 75% of medical records exchanges. Latest numbers indicate that faxes are now used to exchange more than 85% of medical records. Most people would react in horror to such figures. How could physicians and medical personnel rely on antiquated paper technologies like faxes? The real story to be found on the exhibit floor at the HIMSS 2019 conference is that what we are seeing is a rapid transition to digital fax technologies and platforms. And this transition is taking place because physicians and medical staff have figured out they work!

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Fax Technology is the Cornerstone of Interoperability. Here's Why.

Fax is the dominant information exchange technology in U.S. healthcare, outpacing secure direct messaging 25-to-1. Most of that is exchanged using inefficient and unsecure machines. With the emergence of cloud-based fax technology to facilitate secure system-to-system document transfer, the use of cloud fax needs to be part of every CTO's/CIO's digital strategy...The evolution of fax from paper-based to cloud transmission and storage - Cloud Fax Technology (CFT) - is a key step that enables providers to comply with HIPAA and other regulations. Further strengthening CFT as a key component in Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) is its evolution into Direct Messaging platforms, enabling the seamless exchange of Patient Health Information (PHI) between the diverse data and document management systems used by labs, pharmacies, doctor's offices, hospitals, and billing providers. CFT supports and contributes to the goal of interoperability...

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Halamka: Advice to the New National Coordinator

Karen DeSalvo started as the new National Coordinator for Healthcare Information Technology on January 13, 2014.  After my brief discussion with her last week, I can already tell she's a good listener, aware of the issues, and is passionate about using healthcare IT as a tool to improve population health...What advice would I give her, given the current state of healthcare IT stakeholders?

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Health IT Interoperability Reimagined!

The evolution of fax from paper-based to cloud transmission and storage (CloudFax) is a key step that enables CloudFax providers to comply with HIPAA and other regulations. Further strengthening of CloudFax as a key component in Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) will be its evolution into a Direct Messaging platform that enables the seamless exchange of Patient Health Information (PHI) between the diverse data and document management systems used by labs, pharmacies, doctor's offices, hospitals, and billing providers. CloudFax will support and contribute to the goals of interoperability. Consider:

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