Healthcare providers should start paying more attention to encryption of personal health information (PHI), says a new report from the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS). This is not only because of the proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices, but also because of a provision in the Meaningful Use Stage 2 rule that mentions encryption.
While federal health IT officials were touting the perceived successes of their efforts to increase physician usage of electronic health records (EHRs), one longtime advocate of EHRs was criticizing the whole direction of health IT policy. "In my opinion, there is not one successful EHR system in the whole world," said C. Peter Waegemann, who founded and ran the Boston-based Medical Records Institute from 1984 to 2009. "User friendliness, usability, and interoperability are not there," he added in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare.
The market for revenue cycle management (RCM) consulting and outsourcing is growing, a new KLAS Research report says. Increasing pressures on hospitals to cut costs, as well as the diversion of hospital resources to Meaningful Use and ICD-10, are among the factors driving the trend, noted the Orem, Utah-based research firm. "What we're seeing in some instances are folks choosing to use outside resources so they can have some more focus on Meaningful Use," said Mike Smith, VP of financial and services research for KLAS, in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare.
The Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) has launched the first practice-level public quality reporting site in Indiana. More than 750 Indiana physicians from 174 practice sites around the state have agreed to post their clinical quality measure scores on the website of IHIE's Quality Health First (QHF) program. The scorecard shows how well each practice does on 21 measures compared to other practices in their region and the entire state. The clinical measures include process and outcome metrics for treating such conditions as diabetes, heart health and respiratory issues, as well as results for women's and children's health care.
Inadequate security funding, tools and expertise could cost healthcare industry billions of dollars annually, finds Ponemon/ID Expert's third annual study. A majority of organizations polled for Ponemon and ID Expert's third annual benchmark study on privacy and security don't have the technologies, resources and trained personnel in place to take on modern-day privacy and data security risks. Since beginning the benchmarking in 2010, Ponemon and ID Experts have found that threats to healthcare organizations have increased. The organizational costs for dealing with breaches are climbing as well, with the average price tag increasing from $2.1 million in 2010 to $2.4 million in 2012. The report projects that eventually the annual cost of continuous breaches for the industry "could potentially be as high as $7 billion."
Two years and $8.4 billion into the government's effort to get doctors to take their practices digital, some unintended consequences are starting to emerge. One is a lot of unhappy doctors. In a big survey by Medscape this summer 38 percent of the doctors polled said they were unhappy with their electronic medical records system.