Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

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Roadblocks To Public Health Data Sharing

Staff Writer | Government Health IT | December 8, 2014

The sharing of public health data, so essential to health care decision-making in the information age, is being held back by multiple barriers, according to a new study published in the journal BMC Public Health...

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Salesforce Introduces Salesforce Health Cloud -- Building Patient Relationships, Not Records

Press Release | Salesforce | September 2, 2015

Salesforce...today introduced Salesforce Health Cloud, empowering healthcare providers to go beyond health records and build stronger relationships with patients. Salesforce Health Cloud is a cloud-based patient relationship management solution that enables providers to gain a complete view of the patient with integrated data from electronic medical records (EMRs), wearables and more; make smarter care decisions; engage with patients across their caregiver networks; and manage patient data.

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Securing Health Data Means Going Well Beyond HIPAA

Jon R. Anderson | GovTech Works | August 17, 2017

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...

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Security: Healthcare's Fixer-Upper

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | June 4, 2014

The alarming state of affairs, how the industry's slack security is bad for business and what some are doing to step it up...

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States’ Hospital Data For Sale Puts Privacy In Jeopardy

Jordan Robertson | Bloomberg | June 5, 2013

Hospitals in the U.S. pledge to keep a patient’s health background confidential. Yet states from Washington to New York are putting privacy at risk by selling records that can be used to link a person’s identity to medical conditions using public information. Read More »

Techniques for Matching Patient Record Data Across Disparate EHRs and Other Systems

Shahid N. Shah | Healthcare Guy | February 8, 2012

The promise of secure and seamless exchange of patient healthcare information is powerful. As payers, providers, Health Information Exchanges (HIXs) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) move rapidly toward the full deployment of electronic medical records, healthcare IT professionals are grappling with a fragmented network of systems and data silos. Read More »

Telemedicine Clinics Make Inroads Into Primary Care

Don Fluckinger | SearchHealthIT | July 1, 2013

The health IT expansion of the last five years seemed to have left behind videoconferencing for remote patient visits. While it would seem a no-brainer that can potentially save time for both patient and provider, telemedicine seems to have been reserved for high-demand specialists, such as emergency stroke physicians and dermatologists who use telemedicine implementations to bring their skills to patients in rural areas. Read More »

The 128-Byte Data Field That Could Save Lives And Billions Of Dollars

Dan Munro | Forbes | March 25, 2013

I can easily think of 5 articles that highlight the extraordinary waste and cost of the U.S. healthcare system. [...] The PwC report concluded that about $1.2 trillion was wasted – each year. Here’s how PwC further categorized that waste... Read More »

The HITECH Era – A Patient-Centered Perspective

Robert M. Wachter, Michael Blum, Aaron Neinstein, and Mark Savage | Connecting Health Data | October 10, 2017

We appreciate the recent perspectives published in the New England Journal of Medicine on the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the positive impact that it and resulting health IT policies have had on U.S. health care.1,2 The perspectives highlighted the remarkable increase in adoption and use of electronic health records (EHRs) over the past eight years, thanks to the HITECH Act and to ONC’s and CMS’s implementation of it with major advice and help from the multi-stakeholder HIT Policy and Standards committees...

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The Pathway to Patient Data Ownership and Better Health

Katherine A. Mikk, Harry A. Sleeper, and Eric J. Topol | JAMA | September 25, 2017

Digital health data are rapidly expanding to include patient-reported outcomes, patient-generated health data, and social determinants of health. Measurements collected in clinical settings are being supplemented by data collected in daily life, such as data derived from wearable sensors and smartphone apps, and access to other data, such as genomic data, is rapidly increasing. One projection suggests that a billion individuals will have their whole genome sequenced in the next several years. These additional sources of data, whether patient-generated, genomic, or other, are critical for a comprehensive picture of an individual’s health...

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The Rise Of Medical Identity Theft

Michael Ollove | The Pew | February 7, 2014

If modern technology has ushered in a plague of identity theft, one particular strain of the disease has emerged as most virulent: medical identity theft. Read More »

This Little-Known Firm Is Getting Rich Off Your Medical Data

Adam Tanner | Fortune | February 9, 2016

You may never have heard of it, but IMS Health knows an awful lot about your medical history. A global company based in Danbury, Connecticut, IMS IMS 1.58% buys bulk data from pharmacy chains such as CVS CVS 0.72% , doctor’s electronic record systems such as Allscripts, claims from insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and from others who handle your health information...

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Thousands Of NFL Players' Medical Records Stolen From Skins Trainer

Barry Petchesky | Deadspin | June 1, 2016

In late April, the NFL recently informed its players, a Skins athletic trainer’s car was broken into. The thief took a backpack, and inside that backpack was a cache of electronic and paper medical records for thousands of players, including NFL Combine attendees from the last 13 years. That would encompass the vast majority of NFL players, and for them, it’s a worrying breach of privacy; for the NFL, it’s potentially a costly violation of medical privacy laws.Last month the league alerted the players’ union to the theft...

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Ticking All The Boxes For A Health Care Upgrade At Strata Rx

Andy Oram | O'Reilly Strata | October 7, 2013

What is needed for successful reform of the health care system? Here’s what we all know: that a data-rich health care future is coming our way. And what it will look like, in large outlines. Health care reformers have learned that no single practice will improve the system. All of the following, which were discussed at O’Reilly’s recent Strata Rx conference, must fall in place. Read More »

Wearable Devices With Health IT Functions Poised To Disrupt Medicine

Fred O'Connor | PC World | May 1, 2014

The next innovation in health care may come from Silicon Valley. With Google, Apple and Samsung exploring how to incorporate health IT features into wearable devices, patients may soon provide information to doctors through devices such as smartwatches that can measure and transmit biometric data. 

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