Curbing the Red Flags
05/28/10 12:51 pm ET
Lawmakers introduced a bill this week in the U.S. Senate that would exempt doctors from a new law that seeks to protect consumers from identity theft.>>
TECHNOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT
05/28/10 12:51 pm ET
Lawmakers introduced a bill this week in the U.S. Senate that would exempt doctors from a new law that seeks to protect consumers from identity theft.>>
05/27/10 02:56 pm ET
Health care data won't be moving to the cloud any time soon despite an expected increase in the volume of information, according to health IT managers. >>
05/26/10 03:43 pm ET
Scrapping the country's paper medial records and replacing them with health ITsystems is a massive undertaking requiring human capital that currently does not exist. Moreover, producing tens of thousands of health IT experts requires an infrastructure--certified training programs, curricula, instructors and competency exams--that is not yet in place. >>
05/25/10 04:01 pm ET
Provisions relating to the use of health IT are included in a new health insurer code of conduct released this week by the American Medical Association. The set of principles seeks to "bring transparency and accountability" to the multibillion-dollar health insurance industry, AMA said in a news release. >>
05/21/10 09:21 am ET
Digitization of the country's healthcare data has released deep wells of previously untapped capital. The resulting gusher is spewing billions of dollars across government agencies, private companies and healthcare providers. >>
05/24/10 01:35 pm ET
There's an interesting discussion going on over at the Journal of American Medicine about the different types of monitoring and evaluation required to mitigate potential errors in e-health records. >>
05/20/10 02:39 pm ET
The federal government's push for the rapid adoption of electronic health records is engendering considerable pushback. The fiercest clash is over proposed "meaningful use" rules for electronic records that must be met by health-care providers serving Medicare and Medicaid patients, reported Politico this week. Compliance will make providers eligible to share in $19 billion appropriated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as an incentive to digitize medical records. Failure to abide by the guidelines will result in lower reimbursements. A proposed "meaningful use" eligibility rule published in January by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service (CMS) has drawn protests from more than 50 professional associations, chief among them the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association, Politico reported. The groups are spending millions of dollars to lobby elected officials and sway opinion through media messaging. The thrust of those efforts is to relax the meaning of meaningful use by giving providers more time to comply with fewer requirements. The campaign seems to be working. In March, "249 members of the House sent a letter to CMS, calling the new regulation 'too much, too soon for the vast majority of America's hospitals,'" according to the Politico report. "Twenty-seven senators sent a similar letter." >>
05/18/10 04:34 pm ET
Parents increasingly are asking for greater access to their children's pediatricians through email and other online means of communication, according to a new survey.>>
05/17/10 04:35 pm ET
There's a lot of talk swirling about the pros and cons of e-health records. Will they affect cost? Will they improve safety? How feasible are they? But few ever thought to ask those most affected by this technology: the patient. >>
05/14/10 01:10 pm ET
Electronic medical records played a key role in lowering cholesterol in people at very high risk for heart disease to levels considered by many health experts to be unattainable, reports Kaiser Permanente.>>
05/13/10 08:47 am ET
No one would use an e-mail provider that is slower than the U.S. Postal Service. A television remote control that required more effort to use than getting off the couch to manually change channels also would be a nonstarter. So is it any wonder that the uptake of health information technology has been painfully slow?>>
05/12/10 05:38 pm ET
It was just a matter of time. Doctors now use an iPhone app to treat patients.>>
05/11/10 02:12 pm ET
Expansion of health information technology could result in healthcare savings of $261 billion over 10 years, according to a report released this month. >>
05/10/10 04:52 pm ET
As the nation's health industry embraces electronic health records, one area that certainly will become a hot topic -- even more so than now -- is the security of those records. If history is any indication, the digitized medical files will be just as susceptible to hackers and unauthorized users' prying eyes as most other electronic files stored on every network nationwide.>>
05/07/10 03:56 pm ET
In the superfast mobile computing era of iPhones, iPads, Kindles and net books, telemedicine is stuck in a rut. >>
05/05/10 05:24 pm ET
Communities large and small--from San Diego, New Orleans and Indianapolis to Stoneville, Miss. and Brewer, Maine--are among 15 named this week as models for advancing the use of health information technology. >>
05/06/10 12:06 pm ET
Sorting through health insurance options is no picnic. Too many choices, not enough easy-to-find information. >>
05/04/10 10:59 am ET
Arm twisting by powerful health care lobbies stands a good chance of persuading the Obama administration to relax its ambitious timetable for digitizing the country's medical records. >>
05/03/10 05:44 pm ET
Dr. David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health information technology, said last week that an advisory committee investigating reports of adverse events and patient injuries from the use of electronic health records submitted their report to him about three weeks ago. The message: We need to study it more. >>
