Government & Policy
As more health organizations use cloud-based IT services, a patient privacy advocacy group is urging HHS to issue guidance on HIPAA and the cloud.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT wants to use EHR certification criteria to make it easier for physicians to report patient safety events. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will encourage providers to report adverse events to patient safety organizations, and ONC will propose certification requirements that, where appropriate, EHRs can report safety events in AHRQ's Common Formats.
IDC Health Insights group vice president is expecting that, by early March, the healthcare realm will see more HIPAA-compliant cloud services and an influx of organizations willing to sign HIPAA Business Associate Agreements.
Under terms of the $!7 million contract, SAIC will provide operational support for the USCG's Integrated Health Information System.
Now that states have declared their plans for health insurance exchanges, the focus can move from which model to choose -- and its political implications -- to the details of their progress as they prepare for enrollment in October 2013, just 10 months off.
Leon Rodriguez, director of the Office of Civil Rights, foreshadows what the office will be focusing on moving forward when it comes to HIPAA audits and enforcement.
Buried within the latest Ponemon Institute study are some perhaps surprising statistics indicating that privacy and security are scaring a substantial chunk of providers away from joining a health information exchange.
Scott Lundstrom, group vice president of IDC Health Insights, says that states should expect the final health insurance exchange deadline to be pushed back and calls the federal-state model a “tiger trap.”
With the Dec. 14 deadline on health insurance exchanges, states were required to provide a blueprint of their plans to the Department of Health and Human Services for how they will create their state-based health insurance exchanges. About half of the states have decided to surrender control to the federal government to build an exchange for them.
Mark Warner, a Democrat Senator from Virginia, called for "crystal clear requirements for systems," says HIPAA may need to be altered slightly, and just having meaningful use is not enough.