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Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology says the feds should do more than just suggest safeguards.

Mount Sinai Health Partners -- a network made up of the Mount Sinai Health System and a voluntary provider group -- has created an accountable care organization with Aetna, the companies announced on Tuesday. The three-year agreement will allow Aetna commercial plan members who receive care at Mount Sinai to benefit from quality and cost efficiency improvements from the program and establishes a new payment model that will reward physicians for meeting established  quality measures. The partnership is just another step in Mount Sinai's strategy to improve care delivery from traditional fee-for-service models into population health management, by working with health plans like Aetna to improve care value for both the patients and providers. [Also: Healthcare providers weigh pros, cons of Merit-Based Incentive Payment System] "As a health system, we're moving aggressively toward population health," Niyum Gandhi, chief population health officer, Mount Sinai Health System, said. "Our strategy is toward moving into savings for all. When the opportunity came about that aligned incentives around keeping patients healthier - we jumped on it." Currently, Mount Sinai has ACO arrangements with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Healthfirst and Empire, as well as similar contracts in the works that will be made official throughout the coming year. Mount Sinai hopes to have these arrangements with every insurer in its system. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "Our goal here is align our incentives across all payers," Gandhi said. "We're arranging resources to keep patients healthy and out of the hospital. This allows us to align the reward model to reap the benefits."  The agreement includes the more than 3,100 Mount Sinai employees and affiliated physicians. Aetna provides benefits to more than 1.1 million members in New York. "Our new agreement with Mount Sinai puts consumers at the center of a health care system that promotes wellness, provides better care for chronic conditions and uses economic incentives to reward positive health outcomes,” David Kobus, Aetna senior vice president, New York market, said in a statement. Twitter: @JessiefDavis

For the first time, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and America's Health Insurance Plans have announced standard quality measures among payers, a move designed to reduce confusion and complexity for reporting providers. On Tuesday, CMS and AHIP released seven sets of clinical quality measures to help get insurers on the same page. This is the first set that will be used as basis for quality-based payments. They were developed by a Core Quality Measures Collaborative, made up of CMS, major commercial health plans, physician groups and other stakeholders. [Also: CMS, ONC seek feedback on quality measures reporting] These measures create a set of core standards for all payers primarily for physician quality programs. They are in the following seven sets: accountable care organizations, patient centered medical homes and primary care; cardiology; gastroenterology; HIV and Hepatitis C; medical oncology; obstetrics and gynecology; and orthopedics. The measures will be rolled out in several stages, said CMS, which is already using measures from each of the core sets. CMS also said it will apply the core measures to Medicare quality programs, eliminating repetitive measures. Partners in the collaborative recognized that physicians and other clinicians must currently report multiple quality measures to different entities, CMS said. [Also: NQF CEO urges better quality measures] CMS worked with commercial plans, Medicare and Medicaid managed care plans, purchasers, physicians and other care provider organizations, as well as consumers to identify core sets of quality measures that payers have committed to using for reporting. The Core Quality Measures Collaborative, led by AHIP and its member plans' chief medical officers, leaders from CMS and the National Quality Forum, established the broadly agreed upon core measure sets that could be used for both commercial and government payers. More measure sets will be added and updated over time. "In the U.S. healthcare system, where we are moving to measure and pay for quality, patients and care providers deserve a uniform approach to measure quality," said CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt. "This agreement today will reduce unnecessary burden for physicians and accelerate the country's movement to better quality." "This agreement on a set of core measures for primary care and the PCMH represents a big step toward the goal of administrative simplification for family physicians and improved quality of care," said Douglas E. Henley, MD, executive vice president and CEO of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Commercial health plans will use these core sets of measures when contracts come up for renewal, or if existing contracts allow changes in the performance measure set. CMS is also working with federal partners including the Office of Personnel Management, Department of Defense, and Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as state Medicaid plans to align quality measures where appropriate. The Core Quality Measures Collaborative views the upcoming year as a transitional period, as it begins to work with the new measures and affected organizations. They plan to monitor progress, invite broader participation, and possibly add additional measures and measure sets. Patient groups were a vital part of the collaborative. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "What we released today is a start at achieving consensus on the best measures, but we need to continue pushing for even better ones," said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families. "We need measurement that works for clinicians and helps them improve care, while also providing information that is meaningful and actionable for patients and families." This work will influence CMS's implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. It is part of CMS's commitment to ensuring programs work for providers while keeping the focus on improved quality of care for patients, CMS said. CMS has also developed a draft Quality Measure Development plan, fueled by the development of the core measure sets as well as the discovery of gaps in the measures.  Twitter: @SusanJMorse

A leading topic or two seem to have emerged at every HIMSS Annual Conference. What do you think will lead this year?

Experts says cybercriminals favor these types of attacks because they are reasonably easy to pull off and have a big impact. 

(SPONSORED) This synopsis of the 2015 Protected Health Information Data Breach Report provides an analysis overview of confirmed Protected Health Information (PHI) breaches involving more than 392 million records and 1,931 incidents across 25 countries.

OpenNotes is emerging as one of the most promising applications in the national movement toward more effectively engaging patients with a range of technologies including EHRs, mobile software, telehealth tools. And it is proving especially useful in the data liberation revolution.  “Medical care is very expensive and the information in medical records should belong to the patients,” said Homer Chin, MD, the physician champion for the Northwest OpenNotes Consortium. “This opens the record up for them and gives them access to their own information. So it’s really about greater transparency of the healthcare system.” The Northwest OpenNotes Consortium is a group working to implement Open Notes across all health systems in Oregon and the Portland Metro region. See all of our HIMSS16 previews Initial studies of OpenNotes usage have shown that patients felt more engaged in their care and that they were more likely to take medicine as prescribed, Chin said. Seventy-five percent reported taking better care of themselves, better understanding of their medical conditions, and were better prepared for visits. They felt more in control of their care and said that availability of OpenNotes would affect their future choice of providers. “They felt closer to their providers and more engaged with their medical care with the ability to see these notes,” Chin said.  Another potential benefit of OpenNotes is its promise to make medical care more efficient and less expensive. “Our gut sense is it probably will but that remains to be seen because we don’t have the hard data,” Chin said. “If people are on the same page, they won’t be reordering tests, won’t be redoing things. The patient will be more engaged and will understand what’s going on to a greater extent. But data hasn’t been gathered yet.” [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] Early concerns about OpenNotes from physicians about it taking up more time for doctors and patients were allayed with use of the technology. “In our experience, when organizations go live with OpenNotes the predominant thing we hear from physicians is it was a non-event,” Chin said. “When the functionality was implemented, hardly anything was heard from the patients and doctors. In general, after implementing OpenNotes, physicians turned out to be very supportive and found it to be very helpful.”  Chin’s session, "OpenNotes and the Northwest OpenNotes Consortium," is slated for Tuesday March 1, 2016 from 10 to 11 a.m. in the Sands Expo Convention Center room Lando 4201. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Dell's chief medical officer says baby boomers have great expectations about how health IT can work to their advantage.

To help information technology departments succeed at driving new projects, it takes viewing the IT team as partners, not roadblocks. That’s the aim at Illinois-based Advocate Health Care, said Rance Clouser, the system’s vice president of IT field services. Clouser, who leads unified communications and collaboration across the 12 hospitals and 250 care sites included in Advocate's campus, is also in charge of corporate support services, reporting and analytics.  See all of our HIMSS16 previews During a HIMSS16 presentation, "Competing IT Priorities? Master Your Enterprise IT Demand," Clouser will discuss how Advocate achieved better outcomes on initiatives from social, mobile, analytics and cloud techniques, as well as infrastructure. Clouser said that when projects are approached or denied, it's easy to paint IT as the bad guy, but business leadership should be making the big decisions and ensuring the IT department is heard. His team has interviewed many organizations in the healthcare space and recognized Advocate wasn't alone in the need for portfolio management and interoperability. When integrating processes over multiple institutions within one organization, it takes a lot of effort to get things just right. "Apparently, I was pretty naïve when we started out, and I thought it could be done quickly," Clouser said. "Don't underestimate the effort." Advocate’s leadership has allowed its separate sites to remain independent, Clouser said, and that independence in turn enables the communities to tailor their services to the needs of their region and demographic. But the individuality causes troubles with interoperability — an issue Advocate is currently trying to remedy. "We've developed a system, fully in place to work with the business end, upfront, to make sure we're moving toward standardization and consolidation at each site," he added. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] Due to Advocate's size, and the independence of the individual sites, Clouser said, it was imperative to meet with all staff members to learn the culture and needs. Communication is also crucial to ensuring a successful implementation. "Communicate early, often and repeatedly,” Clouser said. “Because it just takes so long for a larger organization to adopt new processes." The session “Competing IT Priorities? Master Your Enterprise IT Demand,” is slated to take place March 1, 2016, from 4 to 5 p.m. in Palazzo B at the Sands Expo Convention Center. Twitter: @JessiefDavis This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Hospital workers resort to handwritten notes and faxes after hackers demand $3.4 million in Bitcoin from the hospital in a ransomware attack.