The American Medical Association and the Medical Group Management Association have released a new online directory of practice management information systems that are capable of meeting HIPAA 5010 transaction standards, Health Data Management reports (Goedert, Health Data Management, 4/28).
HHS has set a deadline of Jan. 1, 2012, for using HIPAA 5010 transaction sets, which regulate the transmission of certain health care transactions (iHealthBeat, 3/14).
AMA President Cecil Wilson said, “As the date for compliance with the government’s updated standard for electronic claims transaction rapidly approaches, physicians need to have practice-management software in place that meets those standards.”
The directory includes information on:
Source: iHealthBeat
Social networking tools, when paired with the use of personal health records, can be valuable in monitoring chronic diseases, according to a study published in PLoS ONE by researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston, Healthcare IT News reports.
The project used a social website, TuDiabetes.org, to invite users to share their personal data regarding one common diabetes control measure known as hemoglobin A1c status. Data were submitted through an application called TuAnalyze, which is based on the hospital’s personal health record program. Data then were shown on county- or state-level maps in real time (Merrill, Healthcare IT News, 4/26).
Overall, one in five website users signed up for the application, and 81% of those users shared their data, the researchers said (Evans, Modern Physician, 4/29).
According to the study, users who signed on to the system within the first two weeks of its launch and those who shared their A1c data openly reported lower average A1c values than those who began using the program later or shared only their aggregate data (Healthcare IT News, 4/26).
Reaction
Kenneth Mandl — associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program’s Intelligent Health Laboratory — said, “There is growing recognition that online communities not only provide a place for members to support each other but also contain knowledge that can be mined for public health research, surveillance and other health-related activities” (Modern Physician, 4/29).
Elissa Weitzman — an assistant professor of pediatrics and adolescent medicine at Harvard — said that using population-based reporting systems can help inform individuals about health research (Healthcare IT News, 4/26).
Source: iHealthBeat
More states are seeking federal approval to use Medicaid funds for telehealth services as they work to address persistent budget deficits and a growing shortage of in-home care providers, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports.
Indiana already provides Medicaid reimbursements for telehealth. Meanwhile, Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services recently asked for federal permission to use Medicaid funds for such services.
About the Technology
Some telemedicine products use cameras to help remote caregivers monitor elderly individuals and people with disabilities. The caregivers can alert residents or family members of health or safety issues that arise.
In addition, electronic sensors can detect temperature changes, carbon monoxide levels and other risk indicators. Some telehealth products also provide services such as medication reminders and food preparation guidance.
Cost Benefits for States
One provider of telemedicine services, called Rest Assured, typically charges $10 an hour, which is about half as much as in-home care. Telehealth services also are significantly less expensive than nursing home care, which can cost upward of $5,000 monthly.
A 2010 study in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare found that Indiana could reduce spending by $13.4 million annually if about 450 residents used telemedicine services. However, officials say they have yet to realize that amount of savings because residents have been slow to adopt the technology (Howington, Louisville Courier-Journal, 4/24).
Source: iHealthBeat
Do you have an exit strategy in place to address the unexpected when it comes to an IT failure? What is your exit strategy in case of a fire, flood or natural disaster? What if your computer crashes tomorrow morning or a virus wipes out all your data? Would you be able to effectively cope with this situation and its potential affect on your practice? If you don’t have a plan in place to handle these types of unexpected events, perhaps you should start thinking about one!
The key is to plan ahead for the unexpected and always be prepared! The more prepared you can be for these situations the less likely it will be that the impact is severe and will disrupt your practice for any length of time.
In this edition of “The Pulse Beat”, you will find articles that explain WHY being prepared and investing in IT is important to your practice.
Thanks again and GREAT READING!
What Is Managed Services and How Can It Help YOUR Business?
All businesses, whether small or large, operate on a day to day basis looking to cut costs, increase production and gain profit. One undeniable necessity for businesses of today remains to be computers and technology. Can you name a business that does not use computers as part of it’s day to day operations…besides the “Paleta guy” on the corner? NO YOU CAN’T!!… Read More
Healthcare Industry Overlooks Critical Gaps In Data Security
As the healthcare industry prepares for a major shift to electronic health records (EHRs) over the next several years, a new bi-annual report provides data that shows that providers are still having difficulty adequately securing patient data in a rapidly changing… Read More
Disaster Recovery Challenges For the Healthcare Industry
When it comes to file servers, healthcare organizations are second only to legal firms in the sheer number of files they keep. They can often, however, be the overwhelming champs when it comes to the amount of data stored in those files. With medical imaging software, patient records, andother data being digitized, more and more information is being stored on file servers. This pattern is very common for any organization, but becomes even more of a burden in the healthcare industry for a few reasons… Read More
When it comes to file servers, healthcare organizations are second only to legal firms in the sheer number of files they keep. They can often, however, be the overwhelming champs when it comes to the amount of data stored in those files. With medical imaging software, patient records, andother data being digitized, more and more information is being stored on file servers. This pattern is very common for any organization, but becomes even more of a burden in the healthcare industry for a few reasons.
First, most healthcare organizations cannot afford outages. Between patient’s lives hanging in the balance and staffers who are simply not accustomed to having to wait for critical data, there’s no allowance for outages. Data loss, similarly, is not an option; as the loss of a patient record could mean that you have no way of knowing of allergies, life-threatening diseases,and other issues. Even in a practitioner’s office that doesn’t practice emergency medicine—a dentist or podiatrist—the lack of this information could mean the accidental prescription of a wholly inappropriate drug.
Second, no matter if you’re working with practitioners or researchers, there are federal and often local regulations that require you to protect patient and other medical data. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability andAccountability Act) requires that data must not only be protected from theft and accidental disclosure, but it must be protected from data loss as well. Add this to your other factors, and there’s an entirely different set of disaster recovery (DR) parameters to be dealt with.
In order to protect file servers for healthcare organizations,you will probably need to take a multi-layered approach to DR. First, there are many different levels of availability that you may need. If you are responsible for a smaller practice, then you’re in luck. In such cases, you can determine your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for the business as a whole. For those who are in larger organizations, you will need to meet with each department to find RTO and RPO numbers individually.
RPO is the amount of data that can be lost to a disaster, usually rated in seconds or minutes of lost data. RTO is how long the system can be offline, usually rated in minutes to hours to days in some cases. Life-sustaining equipment and the file servers that contain the data they need to operate will have the tightest numbers when it comes to RTO and RPO. Research departments, on the other hand, will have a little more flexibility when it comes to downtime; however, with millions of dollars riding on each file, RPO and RTO numbers are uncompromisingly short. The reason you want to nail down these numbers is simple—smaller RTO and RPO numbers equate to larger budget numbers and more expertise needed to mind the systems that mind the data. So failure to get good numbers will lead to either inadequate protection or wasted expense.
The sheer amount of data in question also comes into play when talking about DR. Medical imaging systems store terabytes of data for even smaller hospitals and imaging centers. These files are vital to the well-being of patients, but offer some unique problems when it comes to protecting them. If you’re using tape backups, you will need a very large number of tapes and someplace safe to store them. Your best bet is to contract with a storage facility that can handle the number of tapes in question for as long as your legal advisors recommend you to keep them. Also keep in mind that your RTO will be quite long, as restoration of terabytes of data from tape is generally estimated in terms of days, not hours.
If you use replication systems, you’re going to need a large amount of disk space on the other side of the pipe to hold the replicated data,and tape cannot be ruled out of the mix, since a virus could destroy the files on both sides. Replication gives you a much tighter RTO and RPO, but the budge tincreases significantly, so keep those facts in mind when you start calculating the cost.
Planning DR options for file servers used in the healthcare industry is especially challenging. The amount of data and its vital nature leaves little margin for error. By getting the best possible estimate of RPO and RTO,you can build a plan that allows you to provide the necessary levels of recovery, while not overspending on your budget.
Source: Tech Republic
As the healthcare industry prepares for a major shift to electronic health records (EHRs) over the next several years, a new bi-annual report provides data that shows that providers are still having difficulty adequately securing patient data in a rapidly changing landscape.
The 2010 HIMSS Analytics Report: Security of Patient Data indicates that healthcare organizations are actively taking steps to ensure that patient data is secure. However, these efforts appear to be more reactive than proactive, as hospitals dedicate more resources toward breach response vs. breach prevention through risk management activities.
“The results of the latest study are bittersweet to say the least,” said Brian Lapidus, chief operating officer for Kroll Fraud Solutions. “On one hand, healthcare organizations are demonstrating increased awareness of the state of patient data security as a result of heightened regulatory activity and increased compliance. On the other, organizations are so afraid of being labeled ‘noncompliant’ that they overlook the bigger elephant in the room, the still-present risk and escalating costs associated with a data breach. We need to shift the industry focus from a ‘check the box’ mentality around compliance to a more comprehensive, sustained look at data security.”
Key report findings include:
Source: Net Security
Twenty-eight percent of surveyed health care CIOs who reported barriers to meeting meaningful use criteria cited capturing and submitting quality data as their top concern, according to a March College of Healthcare Information Management Executives survey.
That figure is up from a November 2010 CHIME survey in which 22% of respondents said capturing and submitting quality data was their foremost concern.
Of surveyed health care CIOs who in March reported concerns with meeting meaningful use criteria, 28% cited capturing and submitting quality data as their top concern, compared with 22% who cited the quality data issue as their foremost concern in November 2010, according to a College of Healthcare Information Management Executives survey.
Under the 2009 economic stimulus package, health care providers who demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health record systems can qualify for Medicaid and Medicare incentive payments.
In the most recent survey, 16% of respondents cited certification as their top concern, up from 11% in November 2010.
Nearly 41% of respondents indicated that they are accelerating plans to implement EHRs and other applications necessary to achieve meaningful use, compared with 36% of respondents in November 2010, according to the survey.
In addition, the survey found that 39.5% of respondents feel well-positioned to meet meaningful use rules with their current IT strategies and technology, down from 42% in November 2010.
Results are based on an online survey of 200 CHIME members conducted between March 4 and March 20.
Source: CHIME
Electronic clinical decision support reminders can help physicians avoid ordering unnecessary treatments, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics, Modern Healthcare reports.
Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital studied whether automated alerts built into the hospital’s electronic health record system could aid physicians in complying with new red blood cell transfusion guidelines.
According to the study, the system alerted physicians ordering transfusions about the new guidelines whenever a patient did not meet appropriate criteria for the procedure. The reminders prevented 460 unnecessary transfusions and saved a total of $165,000 in one year, the researchers said.
David Cornfield — medical director of critical care at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and a senior author of the study — said the study “demonstrated that having clinical decision support baked into the fiber of ordering practices can have a significant, durable impact on the delivery of clinical care” (McKinney, Modern Healthcare, 4/18).
Source: iHealthBeat
“The spread of pay-for-performance payment” and adoption of health IT tools raise “concern that physicians might” engage in “cherry-picking” and “lemon-dropping behaviors,” Carson Strong and Jim Bailey — professors in the Department of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center — write in an American Medical News opinion piece.
Cherry-picking refers to the practice of selecting healthier individuals to accept as patients in an effort to meet performance criteria and keep medical practice costs down. Lemon-dropping or “patient dumping” refers to terminating care for patients who could be more costly or difficult to treat.
Strong and Bailey write, “The widespread adoption of [electronic health records] will provide physicians with powerful new tools for data mining that could assist in selection of profitable patients.” They write, “Lemon-dropping can be conducted easily with a highly functioning [EHR] system that includes registries for patients with chronic diseases,” adding that federal privacy rules “do not specifically prohibit these activities.”
However, Strong and Bailey write that “[p]atient selection of this sort is unethical on many levels.”
Reasons Behind Argument
According to Strong and Bailey:
Recommendations
Strong and Bailey provide three recommendations for dissuading cherry-picking and lemon-dropping behaviors:
Source: iHealthBeat
About 27% of primary care and specialty physicians own an Apple iPad or a similar tablet computer, according to a survey released by market research firm Knowledge Networks and the Physicians Consulting Network, American Medical News reports.
The survey polled 5,490 physicians about their use of mobile devices.
Key Findings
The survey found that physicians have adopted tablet computers at a rate five times higher than the general population. It also found that 64% of physicians own a smart phone.
Researchers found that drug reference tools were some of the most popular mobile applications among physicians. Knowledge Networks also noted that more doctors are using mobile devices for:
‘E-Detailing’ Not Catching On
However, the survey found that few physicians are participating in “e-detailing,” or electronic communication between pharmaceutical sales representatives and doctors.
When asked about their preferred communication method with drug company representatives, 23% of primary care physicians and 28% of specialists said they preferred e-detailing.
In addition, few physicians reported using mobile apps from drugmakers (Dolan, American Medical News, 4/18).
Source: iHealthBeat
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