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06 September 2011
Data breaches cost
organizations $156.7 billion over a six-year period, according to new data breach
study by Digital Forensics Association.
The study presents
data breach information collected from 2005 through 2010, including the
disclosure of more than 800 million records over that period. The association
said the overall data breach dollar figure did not include the costs that the
organizations downstream or upstream incurred, or the losses sustained by the
data breach victims. Further, the report, The
Leaking Vault 2011, said the data breach cost estimate was
low because 35% of the incidents did not name a figure for records lost.
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Emily
Bazar, Special to The Chronicle
Monday,
September 5, 2011
Researchers long
ago established that certain medical procedures are performed at dramatically
different rates from place to place, and that these disparities affect the
quality and cost of health care.
Now, health
insurers, hospitals and government agencies from the Bay Area to Washington,
D.C., are getting more aggressive about tackling variation in medical care.
The issue will
surface in San Francisco with a collaboration that started this summer among
Blue Shield of California and some local hospitals and physicians, aimed at
better coordination of patient care for about 26,000 public employees.
The partnership is
modeled after a similar one in the Sacramento region whose early efforts to
rein in variation resulted in training doctors in newer medical techniques and
offering patients less-invasive treatment options.
In the case of
weight-loss surgeries, procedures fell in one year by 13 percent.
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A daunting array of
financial and operational barriers is holding back growth. What can be done?
September
2011 • Basel Kayyali, Zeb Kimmel, and Steve van Kuiken
On
the surface,
technology-enabled home health care should be thriving in the United States.
The country’s aging population and the transformation of acute illnesses such
as heart failure into chronic diseases mean that the number of patients is
growing. In addition, new medical-technology devices could help keep patients
at home rather than in costly institutions, such as assisted-living facilities
or nursing homes—leading to potentially big savings for the health care system.
Instead, the full
potential of the technology-enabled home health care market remains to be
tapped. In the United States, home care accounts for about 3 percent ($68
billion a year) of national health spending. The market is increasing by about
9 percent annually,1
solid but hardly booming growth, especially since labor (mainly nurses and
aides) accounts for about two-thirds2
of the expenditure and home-monitoring technology represents a small fraction
of it. What’s holding the market back? We observe a daunting array of financial
and operational barriers, including the misalignment of incentives between
payers and providers, the need to demonstrate a strong clinical value proposition,
and the problem of designing attractive, easy-to-use products that facilitate
adoption by patients.
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Health information
exchange's project aims to keep diabetic patients out of the ER; if it works,
the technology could pay for itself.
September 08, 2011
As part of a larger
project to reduce the burden of diabetes on patients in western New York,
Buffalo-based health information exchange HealtheLink has launched a pilot to
test the effect of telemonitoring on diabetics' health. A premise of the
18-month pilot is that telemonitoring will pay for itself by reducing the
enrolled patients' emergency room and doctor visits.
While the evidence
for that remains uncertain, the pilot is set up to
measure clinical and claims data for the study group and compare it to data
from a control group of similar patients, Todd Norris, western New York Beacon
Project director for HealtheLink, told InformationWeek
Healthcare. HealtheLink will make quarterly reports to the Office
of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC), which is funding the study
through its Beacon Communities
program. The study will end March 31, 2013.
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September 08, 2011 |
Molly Merrill, Associate Editor
WASHINGTON – The
pilot for the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER), which enables sharing
of Veterans' health records will be expanded, the Department of Veterans
Affairs announced Thursday.
"The expansion
of the VLER pilot program will allow more Veterans and facilities to
participate in this exciting new technology," said Secretary of Veterans
Affairs Eric K. Shinseki. "I invite Veterans to sign up for the program.
It will keep health care providers informed, improve continuity and timeliness
of care, and eliminate gaps in healthcare information."
VLER is a
multi-faceted business and technology initiative that includes a portfolio of
health, benefits, personnel and administrative information sharing
capabilities.
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Among dozens of
vendors selling technology products and services to health information
exchanges, no clear player dominates, study says.
September 07, 2011
The health information
exchange (HIE) vendor market is still very fragmented, with more than three
dozen companies identified as providing IT products and services to these data
sharing initiatives, according to a new report.
Of the 35 vendors
HIEs named as product and services providers, no vendor has a majority foothold
yet, according to a new report released by the
eHealth Initiative, which recently surveyed 196 of the 255 HIEs currently
operating in the United States. The HIEs surveyed ranged from state-run
initiatives to community-based organizations, including for-profit and
non-profit efforts.
Leading the pack is
Axolotl, which provides products and services to 22 of the 196 (about 11%)
surveyed HIEs. Axolotl was recently renamed OptumInsight, and is part of
UnitedHealth Group's health IT services business. The next most prevalent HIE
vendor is Medicity, being used in 14
initiatives, followed by a tie between Cerner and Mirth, with each providing
products and services to nine HIEs.
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Health
Data Management Magazine, 09/01/2011
On one level, the
meaningful use electronic record incentive program is all about the money. Many
providers, especially small practices, jumped head first into the program
because the financial incentives made it possible to automate at little or no
cost-if they got those incentive checks.
Take Springfield
(Ohio) Center for Family Medicine, where all six physicians have attested to
meaningful use, with four by mid-July having received $18,000 first-year checks
from the Medicare incentive program, and the other two awaiting payment.
That money is
already flowing downstream at the practice, which purchased a document
management and imaging system along with workstations, all integrated with the
electronic records and practice management systems of Horsham, Pa.-based
NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, says Cindy Brewer, office manager. The
EHR and the purchase of ancillary technology would not have been done without
the incentive payments, she adds. "We've wanted to do it but didn't know
when the finances were going to be there."
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Posted: September 8, 2011 - 12:00 pm ET
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information
Technology on Thursday announced the launch of its new
HealthIT.gov website
targeting consumers as well as healthcare providers.
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8 September
2011 Shanna Crispin
NHS South East
Essex has created a shared electronic patient record across primary, secondary
and community care for patients with COPD.
The primary care
trust decided some years ago to develop an integrated primary care system
strategy.
This involved
moving the majority of its GP practices onto the hosted SystmOne GP, and
deploying SystmOne systems into its community services and prison.
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Although accessibility of electronic
medical records (EMR) on tablet devices is nothing new (we've been reporting on
such capabilities
as far back as April 2010), that
doesn't make recent announcements from
drchrono,
Epocrates,
GE,
Greenway Medical Technologies and
SAP about their mobile EMR
offerings any less important. Rather, it reaffirms the
notion that mobility in healthcare is king, something all current and
future EMR vendors would be wise to take note of.
The users, doctors and other medical professionals, are flocking to
the iPad and devices like it in droves. In May,
Manhattan Research concluded that 75 percent of
U.S. physicians owned an Apple mobile device in one form or another.
More recently, the medical schools at Ivy League heavyweights
Harvard and Yale each announced its
own mobility news. Harvard is creating a set of apps specifically for med
students, and Yale has handed out 520 iPads to its students.
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Cloud-based
electronic medical record systems may not be as vulnerable to security breaches
as once thought, as more vendors begin to offer these systems as an option and
information is made available about how they operate.
There has been some
industry concern, if a Physicians Practice blog
post is any indication, that cloud-based EMR
systems, which operate on the web rather than on site at a provider, were more
vulnerable to cyber attacks and other security risks. But that's not
necessarily true, according to Sheldon Needle, president of CTSGuides, a
software screening and referral service. Needle recently posted on
his own blog, comparing the two types of systems.
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Thursday, September 8, 2011
Silicon
Valley investors helped reinvent everything from sharing photos to buying books
online. Now can they fix health care?
By
Deborah Erickson
Some prominent
venture capitalists are betting that the Internet strategies that created
giants such as eBay and PayPal could reshape the ailing U.S. health-care
system. That system currently devours 18 percent of the world's largest GDP
while delivering mediocre health results.
In August, the
online health marketplace ZocDoc, which lets patients look up doctors by specialty
and zip code and make appointments over the Internet, raised $50 million from
the investment fund of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who in the past has
backed companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon.
The idea behind
ZocDoc and other startups getting funding is that our costly, paper-based
health-care system is ripe for the same technological fixes—such as data
visualization, cloud computing, and mass-market self-service concepts—that have
transformed industries such as consumer banking and travel.
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Program led by
Farzad Mostashari, before he became national health IT coordinator, supports
entering structured data into an EHR to monitor a population's health.
September 06, 2011
In a New York City
program that subsidized doctors' electronic health records (EHRs) in return for
sharing quality data with the city, physicians showed significant improvements
on eight of 10 preventive care indicators, according to a
new study in the
Journal
of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).
The findings
provide some perspectives on the federal government's Meaningful Use program,
which requires attestation-of-quality data this year and electronic reporting
in 2012. Not coincidently, the national coordinator of health IT, Farzad
Mostashari, MD, who has responsibility for implementing the federal incentive
program, led the team that created the New York EHR program when he was assistant
commissioner of the city's department of health and
mental hygiene.
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Health IT managers
are looking at the damage done and reassessing their disaster planning
strategies.
September 06, 2011
Like other natural
disasters before it, Hurricane Irene disrupted hospital services in the
Northeast, causing hospital IT officials to once again mull their disaster
preparedness strategies.
Several recent
reports in the aftermath of Irene show how damaging hurricanes can be to
hospital systems. At Johnson Memorial
Medical Center in Stafford Springs, Conn., 43 patients
were relocated to other medical facilities when the hospital lost power and
utility workers were prevented from fixing the problem because of the
approaching storm.
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Posted: September 7, 2011 - 12:01 am ET
The medical records of about 7.9 million people have been exposed in
more than 30,750 healthcare-related security breaches since breach notification
requirements took effect two years ago, according to a report by the HHS
secretary and the Office for Civil Rights at HHS.
The vast majority of the breaches—more than 30,500 of them—were
relatively small-scale mishaps that involved fewer than 500 records each and
collectively accounted for the unauthorized disclosure of the records of
roughly 62,000 individuals, according to the
report to
Congress (PDF).
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HDM
Breaking News, September 7, 2011
The Office of the
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has launched Query
Health, an initiative to establish standards for querying widely distributed
data sources such as electronic health records.
Three workgroups,
with membership being solicited, will cover business, clinical, and technical
implementation issues. The business work group will handle privacy, security,
consent, sustainability, data use arrangements and best practices. The clinical
work group will develop use cases, functional requirements, and standards for
an information model, query syntax and results expression. The technical
workgroup is responsible for implementation of Query Health and support of
pilot projects.
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Posted: September 8, 2011 - 12:00 pm ET
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information
Technology formally introduced its
Query Health data-sharing program. The
program is part of its standards and interoperability framework—an initiative
to promote health information exchange.
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September 06, 2011 | Tom
Sullivan, Editor
Health information
exchanges running the CONNECT platform take note: The CONNECT team has issued a
new version, 3.2.1, which fixes a number of bugs and known issues.
The open source
software taps National Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) standards and
protocols to enable the creation of an HIE and the exchanging of healthcare
information, both regionally and on a national level.
Connect 3.2.1
corrects known problems, and the latest iteration can correlate multiple
responses for patient discovery, defer patient discover requests and make
policy checks inside the gateway and refactor deferred services implementation.
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2011-09-02
As physicians use mobile
devices in large numbers, IT departments at health care organizations need a
strategy to support them, according to a new CSC report.
CSC, an IT integrator
and cloud-service provider, has released a new report suggesting that health
care IT departments should act fast to support the mobile devices that
physicians are using.
Doctors are
adopting smartphones at more than twice the rate of the general population,
according to CSC's report, called "Harnessing the Value of mHealth for
Your Organization." More than 17,000 health care apps are available for
smartphones, the company said.
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Posted
by Anthony Guerra on September 6th, 2011
Looking for greater
integration with other core clinical applications, providers have invited
enterprise HIT vendors to enter the Oncology arena, according to a new KLAS
report Oncology IS 2011: Integrating the Island.
The specialty is
one fraught with information silos, due to physicians moving between hospitals
and clinics, and patients moving between infusion suites and radiation oncology
facilities.
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Wednesday, September 7, 2011
A
look, in numbers, at the forces shaping electronic medicine.
By
Antonio Regalado
A recent video that
appeared on YouTube.com asked: What if air travel worked like health
care?
The hilarious
answer (here) shows an imaginary
traveler attempting to book a flight to Eugene, Oregon on Air Health
Care. Frustration mounts as he's instead offered a flight to Chicago for
$17,885, but only if he first faxes in his "complete flight history."
There are plenty of
reasons that health care isn't as automated as airline reservations or check
processing. Each person's health situation is, if not unique, immensely
personal. Would anyone want to book radiation treatment on a medical Orbitz?
Even so, automating
the collection and processing of medical information is an huge opportunity for
hospitals and software companies. The U.S. medical establishment has yet to
universalize even simple look-ups, such as what drugs a patient is taking, and
has only begun to harness such phenomena as cell-phone apps and Web 2.0 trends
like crowd sourcing to improve health care.
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o AvantiKumar
07.09.2011 kl 00:14 | MIS
Asia
The adoption of
information technology (IT) in the healthcare industry is speeding up, driven
in part by cloud computing, according to Asia-based healthcare IT solutions
provider iSOFT Health Asia.
The adoption of
information technology (IT) in the healthcare industry is speeding up, driven
in part by cloud computing, according to Asia-based healthcare IT solutions
provider iSOFT Health Asia.
iSOFT Health Asia
general manager Dr Timothy Nam said the healthcare industry has been slower
than other sectors in adopting IT solutions. "Having to manage, as well as
maintain, healthcare's legacy systems and upkeep its traditional best
practices, many called the health sector extremely backward. In fact, quite a
number of observers have declared it as being 20 years behind the banking
sector."
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September 01, 2011 | Tom
Sullivan, Editor
The finding: A
survey of 27,000 adult diabetics spanning 500 primary care physicians across 46
practices in the Cleveland area found that those practices employing EHRs
earned “annual improvements in healthcare that were 10 percent greater than
their paper-based counterparts,” and their patients were “significantly more
likely to have healthcare and outcomes that align with accepted standards than
those where doctors rely on paper records.”
Government Health
IT
Editor Tom Sullivan interviewed two of the study’s authors – Randall Cebul,
director of the Center for Healthcare Research and Policy at MetroHealth
Medical Center and a professor of medicine, epidemiology and biostatistics at
Case Western Reserve University; and Anil Jain, senior executive IT director at
the Cleveland Clinic while the study was being conducted, and now CMIO at
Cleveland Clinic spin-off Explorys – about the gap in care quality between patients
attending practices using EHRs and those still in the paper- and filing-cabinet
era, the competitive nature of providers sharing patient data, and bridging the
chasm between EHRs and PHRs.
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The use of social media and online networking promises to be
important both in clinical trial recruitment and in clinical discovery. Down
the line, it might even prove valuable in comparative effectiveness research.
A new Mayo Clinic study shows that social media can help researchers
find patients with rare diseases who are candidates for clinical trials more
quickly than conventional methods of recruitment.
Using patient-run websites dedicated to heart conditions and women's
heart health, a team of cardiologists led by Sharonne Hayes, MD, is reaching
out to survivors of spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), a condition
that affects only a few thousand people a year, but can be fatal if it leads to
a heart attack.
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Montefiore Medical
Center in the Bronx, N.Y., has begun using a cloud-based service to share
medical images among multiple physicians without entering them into the
healthcare system's picture archiving and communication system (PACS),
according to an article in InformationWeek.
These are images
that the Montefiore specialists use in their review of referrals before they
accept patients for treatment. The images, which may arrive on disc or film,
have not been entered into the PACS. In case more than one physician has to
view the images, the other doctors can pull them down from the cloud rather
than waiting for the physical media to be delivered.
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Verizon is
expanding its cloud-based identity-management services for healthcare
providers. Verizon Universal Identify Services-Healthcare, founded in November
2010, now supports new identity standards for accessing electronic health
records and health information exchanges. In addition, it offers new features
for electronic prescribing, including the prescribing of controlled substances.
Verizon now
provides legally binding digital signature capabilities for authenticating
signatures on clinical documents. The company's new ID Message Center allows
users to monitor their digital signature activities through a mobile
application or optional Web-based portal. Providers can use their smartphones
or other mobile devices to gain access to Verizon's identity management
features.
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John Halamka, CIO
of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a professor of medicine
at Harvard Medical School, is one of the most respected opinion leaders in
health IT. He's also one of the smartest people I know. Yet his new piece in
the MIT Technology
Review, predicting where health IT will take us
in the next five years, is too optimistic by half.
I don't dispute
Halamka's contention that the pace of electronic health record adoption will
accelerate dramatically, partly because of the federal government's incentive
program. Nor do I disagree with his argument that health IT will be essential
to transforming the provider payment system in ways that can control cost
growth.
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1 September
2011 Fiona Barr
The outage at the
EMIS data centre was “a very rare occurrence” caused by a number of complex,
interacting factors that are unlikely to be repeated, the company has said.
In a statement
issued first to EHI Primary Care, Sean Riddell, the chief executive of EMIS,
said the investigation into the
outage on 18 August - which affected almost 800 GP practices -
has now been concluded.
He added: “This
shows that the outage was the result of a number of complex, interacting
factors- it was, in effect, a very rare occurrence that could not have been
predicted.
“At its core was a
series of multiple, consecutive component failures in one of our storage
devices – combined with a previously unknown bug in the hard disk firmware –
that culminated in an unexpected shutdown of the entire device.”
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Gienna
Shaw, for HealthLeaders Media , September 6, 2011
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine is
among the first to put hard numbers on the benefits of electronic health
records.
- eye
exams,
- pneumonia
vaccinations,
- outcome
measures such as blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol control,
- patient-driven
issues such as obesity and smoking
Nearly 51% of patients in EHR practices received care that met all
four quality standards, compared to just 7% of patients at paper-based
practices. Nearly 44% of patients in EHR practices met at least four of five
outcome standards, compared to about 16% of patients at paper-based practices.
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Tuesday, September 06, 2011
by
Kate Ackerman, iHealthBeat Managing Editor
With health care
providers working to implement electronic health records to qualify for
meaningful use incentive payments and vendors seeing big spikes in business, it
is not surprising that there is a huge demand for health IT professionals. What
is surprising, though, are reports from recent graduates of federal health IT
training programs who say they can't find a job.
It's been estimated
that the country will need up to 50,000 health IT professionals to help doctors
and hospitals meet meaningful use criteria.
With the U.S.
unemployment rate hovering around 9%, health IT is seen as an area ripe for job
creation. The federal government has invested millions of dollars in developing
a skilled health IT workforce, and interest in federal health IT training
programs has been high.
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Tuesday, September 6, 2011
White
House aide leads push to improve health-care IT with billions in stimulus
funds.
By
David Talbot
In a landmark
government effort to drive American health care into the information age, the
February 2009 stimulus bill earmarked about $30 billion in incentives for
doctors and hospitals who install electronic medical records—paying up to
$63,750 to individual physician and millions to hospitals.
Now comes the tough
part: implementing "EMRs" and proving they really can reduce medical
errors or get doctors to keep better track of chronically ill people. As
National Coordinator for Health IT, Farzad Mostashari coordinates federal
efforts to promote adoption of EMRs and to prod reluctant hospitals to share
patient data.
Mostashari was
recruited to take over the federal effort in February, after leading a
patient-records initiative as an assistant health commissioner in New York
City. He spoke with Technology
Review's chief correspondent, David Talbot, about when we'll start
seeing evidence that the technology is working.
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1 September
2011 Fiona Barr
Mobile working
by community staff could save £3,000 per clinician per year, the
Department of Health’s National Mobile Health Worker project has concluded.
A 254-page report
says clinicians working across the 11 sites
in the project estimated that mobile devices loaded with office and clinical
software allowed them to make nearly 9% fewer referrals and avoid 21% of
admissions.
Using standardised
costs developed by Kent University, the project estimated this would equate to
a saving of £3,002 per clinician per year.
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- Martin Regg Cohn
- Fri Sep 02 2011
The provincial
election is about to begin, but the campaign against eHealth Ontario is already
two years old — and still going strong.
EHealth is the gift
that keeps on giving, the kiss of death in a field that is supposed to save
lives. Brace yourself, in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 6 vote, for yet more
reruns of the “billion-dollar-boondoggle” attack line.
Toronto Mayor Rob
Ford used that catchphrase to devastating effect against his opponent in the
city’s mayoral election — former provincial health minister George Smitherman,
who carried much of the baggage for the eHealth fiasco. But like that other
Ford slogan — “ending the gravy train at city hall” — the billion-dollar-boondoggle
allegation doesn’t quite add up.
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Enjoy!
David.
