News
While criminals tap into traditional skills to thieve tremendous sums from the vulnerable medical ecosystem, by using big data and analytics, healthcare agencies can now reverse the pay-and-chase investigative process to better detect and fight fraud.
Insecure IT systems have left hospitals lousy with viruses and malware. Implantable medical devices are vulnerable to hackers and cyber criminals. How real is the danger? And what's being done to fight it?
Idaho State University will pay $400,000 to the U.S. Department of Health Human Services to settle alleged violations of the HIPAA Security Rule. The settlement comes after ISU's Pocatello Family Medicine Clinic disabled server firewall protections for a period of at least 10 months, resulting in the breach of electronic protected health information for some 17,500 patients.
The Beacon Communities proved that organizations can advocate changes to how healthcare is paid for by working with payers and providers, while improving quality and safety at the same time. "These were the pillars of the Beacon Community activities, and they taught us," National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD, said. "They showed what we needed to do."
More than half of all eligible providers nationwide have received federal incentive payments for demonstrating meaningful use of electronic health records, rates that have more than doubled since last year alone, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday.
Transparency is a touchy subject in healthcare. It's one of the last market strongholds desperately clutching to its principles of secrecy, and it won't go down without a fight. But many experts say this stands as one of many reasons the industry continues to drag its feet in the innovation arena.
IT decisions made today will affect future initiatives and health insurance exchanges' ability to keep pace with healthcare reform.
There are buzz phrases, and then there are buzz phrases. And if there's one phrase that has permeated the healthcare sector more thoroughly than all the others, it's probably "accountable care." But what exactly does it mean? Or, more to the point for healthcare providers, how do you know when you're actually providing it?
Ever since the updated HIPAA rule took effect last March, some hospital IT departments see themselves as "the HIPAA police," clamping down in ways that the rule doesn't require, says one industry expert.
Healthcare organizations will need to be more effective, cost efficient and productive in the future to not only survive, but also to maintain positive cash flows, according to Brian Fugere, COO of RemitDATA.