US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)

The U.S. should have had a nationwide network to monitor for the next viral outbreak or biological threat a decade ago. It still doesn't. Instead, public health leaders make do with a patchwork system while waiting for the Department of Health and Human Services races to get its integrated network in service by a new 2023 congressional deadline. Until that nationwide monitoring system is in place, the U.S. runs the risk that a biological threat like a disease outbreak will take hold before it's noticed. "The risk is that we don't have the level of surveillance that we need. The risk is that there are things basically flying under the radar," said Helen Boucher, an infectious diseases clinician at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and director of the university's Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance.

Read More »

Two of three consumers revealed they will consider changing their physician and hospital providers in the coming year after learning how their health record was not shareable or available or was blocked in the past year...Five hundred and nine managers of frontline providers confirm the lack of general interoperability across the entire U.S. health care system has detracted from COVID-19 patient care, led to poor health outcomes and higher expenditures, and left population health data muddy and deficient...."Portability of data in the middle of this pandemic is vital," said Doug Brown, President of the survey organization Black Book Research. "But resolving systemic data blocking and platforms interfering with the exchange of patient data are not on the industry's front burner."

Read More »

Regenstrief Institute research scientist Theresa Cullen, M.D., has won a Leading for Impact, Women in Leadership award. The award recognizes women who are creating impact and leading programs across the federal technology, health and consulting community. The award is given by FedHealthInnovation & Technology (FedHealthIT), which is a consolidated news source for information related to federal health agencies. Dr. Cullen also is the associate director of the Regenstrief Institute Global Health Informatics program and the interim director of strategic planning and communications for LOINC. She recently led a project to help the United States government's Indian Health Service identify and define its needs for a new health information technology system.

Read More »

A two-decade-old law designed to protect patients’ privacy may be preventing health care organizations from doing more to protect vulnerable health care data from theft or abuse. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) established strict rules for how health data can be stored and shared. But in making health care providers vigilant about privacy protection, HIPAA may inadvertently distract providers from focusing on something just as important: overall information security...

Read More »

Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year. The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates.

Read More »