A grant program is trying to help doctors, clinics and hospitals in rural California link to HIEs, so patients being referred for specialized care in urban areas can have their medical history follow them.
Despite the frustration and the jokes around iEHR, real data exchange is happening between the DoD and VA and the potential to build on that for the future resides in creatively using resources built in the past.
The New York eHealth Collaborative has announced the three finalists of its PHR design challenge, and is now seeking proposals for a patient portal that'll be available for all New Yorkers in 2014.
With a population 6 million, southeastern Pennsylvania is getting its first HIE, with providers and payers on board to collaborate with patient discharge and clinical history sharing.
Saying that the proposed legislation would address "the failure of DoD and VA to develop a single unified medical record," one of the bill's backers explains that it would require VA and DoD to prove they are implementing a plan for that single medical record.
As part of its plan to build a statewide HIE infrastructure, Florida HIE has hooked up two regional HIEs, which in in turn are connecting several providers.
In a rousing and impassioned speech, ONC's chief said that America is halfway through digitizing healthcare and five percent of the way through transforming workflows to take advantage of the infrastructure. Achieving that will require new roles of the entire care team.
The promise of HIEs to provide insights across the continuum of care that can dramatically alter the health of populations is emerging as among the most significant reasons for exchanging health data.
State officials have released a draft of model agreements aimed at offering HIEs and their participants a "scalable trust" that fits with multiple HIE models and also helps them comply with HIPAA's new business associate provisions.
The ONC Policy Committee's Privacy and Security team says there's no need for limitations on providers trying to locate patient record for direct treatment, aside from patient choice. The issue does raise some policy questions, though, and the Committee asked for a reformulation of the team's suggestions.
As healthcare providers implement health IT to comply with federal mandates and participate in quality of care programs, VNA solutions can play a critical role in helping them meet their needs today and in their future IT initiatives. Forward-thinking healthcare providers around the world are already successfully meeting this challenge with VNA. Download this Healthcare IT News eBook to learn how VNA enables exchange, supports data consolidation and IT simplification.
In this one hour webinar, Thomson Reuters and Verisys will outline several key areas of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and screening requirements. An overview of available public records data as well as strengths and weaknesses of various datasets will be discussed. We invite an open discussion to elaborate on the efficiencies that can be seen when the correct data is applied to the compliance workflow.
The current agenda is clear: wherever possible, reduce costs and
improve quality-of-care services. These directives are in perfect
alignment with the role of virtual and cloud computing infrastructure
technologies, which help to lower costs and increase clinician
productivity while future-proofing IT investments. As healthcare
reform deadlines rapidly approach, choosing the right information
technology (IT) platform will be critical to the success or failure
of new services and exchanges. It will determine the ease or
di!culty of updating existing applications and managing new
ones. It will also serve as a foundation to help ensure that all
healthcare services are secure, accessible and easy enough for
citizens to access and use.
This report provides information on some of the challenges PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) and RIS (Radiology Information System) end-users face in the healthcare space, and how virtualization and point of care solutions can help address those challenges. In this paper, we discuss what the challenges are and present a strategy of utilizing architecture for PACS/RIS client access, which supports the needs of end users and makes it easier for IT staff to manage applications and desktop environments.
The healthcare sector is adopting enterprise hybrid cloud across the provider, payer, and life sciences segments with the goal of improving the quality of care, reducing costs, and increasing responsiveness to risk. This industry brief goes over some results of the CIO Global Cloud Computing Adoption Study, a recent survey by IDG Research, and outlines the common hybrid cloud use cases for healthcare organizations. It also details a real-world example of how cloud computing is being used to achieve greater business agility.
Healthcare is dominated by the need for the sharing of detailed patient information as a result of today's information age. But it's also the focal point of the debate of how information is shared versus protecting the need for privacy, security and confidentiality. Data protection is paramount in today’s virtual environment and implementing a Secure Information Exchange (SIE) now will help organizations save both themselves and their patients down the road.
If Hospitals and Providers are the body of the healthcare industry, Healthcare Electronic Data Interchange is the heartbeat. This whitepaper compares the different solutions and costs for achieving HIPAA-compliant EDI, explains the specific technical challenges in the way of successful implementations, and explores new avenues for bridging the gap to an in-house implementation.
Medicare Advantage (MA) plans are private health plans that have contracted with Medicare to receive a fixed monthly fee in exchange for providing comprehensive healthcare to plan members. In order to provide appropriate care to beneficiaries with varying medical conditions, plans are paid according to the Risk Adjustment Factor (RAF) score of each patient. Insufficient documentation of chronic conditions can be an obstacle to MA reimbursement. However, even when a condition has been properly documented by the provider, it is often not coded and submitted to Medicare. Read this white paper to learn how to take the complexity out of MA reimbursement.
A recent survey of IT executives found nearly 90% see business value in transitioning to Cloud computing, but only 20% have a plan to get there. Healthcare Cloud solutions require Compliance, Security, Privacy, Redundancy, and Scalability, so choosing the right path from on-premises servers to the Cloud can be daunting. Learn how to chart a quick and affordable course to healthcare Cloud Computing and how to choose the right Cloud services partner.
In January 2010, QualSight - the nation’s largest LASIK manager serving over 75 million health plan members - was informed that a hack attempt had been made against their infrastructure. They were concerned that a repeat occurrence could take place and wanted to take a pro-active role in eliminating any future occurrence. QualSight began searching for a better solution for its secure Web hosting and online data storage. The company had stringent requirements for both HIPAA and PCI compliance, and could not find a hosting provider with a fully managed solution that took into account both of those high industry standards, while also providing top performance. Download this case study to find out how QualSight finally found a solution that offered complete HIPAA compliancy.
Healthcare providers must assure patients the utmost security, confidentiality, and integrity of sensitive information. This means maintaining total HIPAA compliance within their organization, including healthcare IT infrastructure. This white paper elucidates HIPAA compliant IT infrastructure, from physical and environmental controls, to appropriate guidelines between a Covered Entity and data center provider when outsourcing. It also helps clarify key points including service provider qualifications, and why Business Associate Agreements are integral for establishing accountability with partners.
The time has come to tackle integrity of health information, not just the technical and operational mechanisms for the sending and receiving it, particularly as EHR kinks get ironed out both among internal users and the patients they serve.
This week in Government Health IT: Reports expose state and local governments as ill-prepared, whether that be for Big Data or cyber-attacks. Also, think tanks talk patient-centered care for cost-savings.
In the coming months, the ONC Standards Committee is going to hear updates from workgroups on a variety of software and policy standards for issues like structured data, genomics representation and modular application integration.
Despite agreeing with many statements in the report, Health Standards blogger Keith Boone sets the record straight about 6 GOP Senators calling for a 'reboot' of the meaningful use incentives program.
Winding down the community site, Editor Jeff Rowe delves into an IDC report to suggest that health IT professionals incorporate other big tasks into their EHR plans.
A potential boon to healthcare price transparency, new HIE tools take on data integration and population health, dreaming about big data, and the uncertain future facing the ACA at 3.