The healthcare landscape has changed a lot since Delaware Health Information Network (DHIN), the first statewide health information exchange (HIE) in the U.S., went live in the spring of 2007, says Gina Perez, MPA, the DHIN executive director. Perez, who also serves on the Department of Health and Human Services' Health IT Standards Committee, recently spoke with CMIO about these changes and what’s next for DHIN.
A password-protected laptop computer containing information about 61,027 Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center patients from multiple states and several foreign countries has been stolen.
Written by Mary Stevens
Want to stop patient data breaches? Get to the root of the problem.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) needs to resolve long-standing deficiencies in securing its information and systems, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
John Muir Health began notifying 5,450 patients by mail about a potential breach of their personal and health information on April 5. The notification follows the theft of two laptop computers at the John Muir Physician Network perinatal office in Walnut Creek, Calif., in February.
Blanket patient identification protection policies, such as Safe Harbor, leave different organizations vulnerable to re-identification at different rates and provide justification for locally performed re-identification risk estimates prior to sharing data, according to a study published in the March issue of the Journal of the American Informatics Association.
Written by Justine Cadet
ATLANTA—Whether enough is being done to protect the rights of patient data, while simultaneously allowing for health information to be exchanged amongst care providers under the proposed meaningful use definitions, became an area of contention during today's Meaningful Use Town Hall discussion during the CIO Forum, co-hosted by CHIME and HIMSS, at the HIMSS10 conference.
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Privacy & Security Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on an initial set of standards, implementation specifications and certification criteria for EHRs for the interim final rule (IFR) of meaningful use.
New regulations requiring healthcare providers, health plans and other HIPAA-covered entities to notify an individual when their health information is breached were issued Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The HIPAA Privacy Rule does not adequately protect the privacy of personal health information and hinders important health research discoveries, according to a report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM); which has also called on Congress to develop a new approach to protecting personal health information for research.
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“We’re beginning a revolution the way information is collected, managed, used and purposed for patients in the U.S. healthcare system,” said David Blumenthal, MD, chair of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, in opening remarks at an audioconference training session on meaningful use and EHR certification last week.
In Part 1 of our closer look at the final rules for meaningful use and EHR certification standards, CMIO’s Jeff Byers spoke with David Blumenthal, MD, chair of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. In Part 2, CMIOs weigh in with mixed reviews.
The framework for meaningful use is “something that had to be done and has been started intelligently,” John P. Glaser, PhD, vice president and CIO of Partners HealthCare System told CMIO. However, the challenges of becoming meaningful users and optimizing health information exchange will require unprecedented levels of communication within organizations and among healthcare systems, he said.
The contractual obligations in the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on modifications to the HIPAA privacy, security and enforcement rules under the HITECH Act for business associates and downstream entities are game changers, according to Amy S. Leopard, JD, from Walter and Haverfield, during a webinar sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
Standardizing performance measures, with the help of health IT, will make it possible to collect the right data at the right time to support performance measurement, clinical decision support, clinical research and quality improvement, said Janet M. Corrigan, PhD, president and CEO of the National Quality Forum (NQF) during a webinar hosted by the forum on June 17.