News
In its second reported data breach this fall, Kaiser Permanente is notifying patients seen at its Anaheim Medical Center that their protected health information has been compromised after a USB flash drive containing patient data went missing.
In a joint letter to the House Ways & Means and Senate Finance Committees, several industry groups have implored legislators to incentivize integration between electronic health records and remote patient monitoring, to spur better use of patient-generated data in payment reform efforts.
Epic Systems Corp. will help Oregon Health & Science University set up two laboratory installations of its EpicCare electronic health record on its servers for medical informatics education and research purposes. On the research side, the school will have access to Epic's source code.
Among this week's people on the move, DaVita HealthCare announces executive transitions, and Wego Health welcomes a new senior vice president of innovation.
With annual healthcare expenditures topping $2.7 trillion, industry leaders are rushing to take new cost-cutting measures. One of those measures involves displaying the costs of lab tests in an EHR so docs can see a real-time price comparison of what they're ordering. From a savings perspective, it's working.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has proposed a bill to extend meaningful use incentives to mental health practitioners, who currently have been left out of the program.
When a medical privacy breach occurs, it's most often the patient who gets notified that their personal information was compromised, not the provider. But that's not always the case.
Currently, mental health providers are not eligible to receive federal electronic health record incentive payments under the meaningful use program. One U.S. Senator, however, is working to change that.
If hospital chief information officers and vendor hiring managers think it's tough to find qualified health IT workers now, just wait until technology implementation moves beyond EHR installation, data capture and moderate interoperability to a full-blown effort to transform a broken healthcare industry.
Don't hold your breath if you are looking for a delay in meaningful use Stage 2 of the federal EHR incentive program.