Here are a few I have come across this week.
Note: Each link is followed by a title and a paragraph or two. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or payment.
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http://www.bio-itworld.com/issues/2010/may-jun/halamka.html
Harnessing (and Securing) Meaningful Data
John Halamka talks about the future of health data.
By Allison Proffitt
May 18, 2010 | “There isn’t going to be some massive database in the basement of the White House run by Sarah Palin,” promised John Halamka, the CIO of Harvard Medical School, in his keynote at the Bio-IT World Expo. But there will be a “federated mechanism that enables us to send data from place to place for a whole variety of purposes for care and research.”
Halamka serves as the Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel. Of the $30 billion allotted to health care IT in the Obama Administration’s stimulus package, most of it will be distributed to hospitals and clinics after they’ve put health care IT infrastructure in place and are using it wisely. The remaining $2 billion is being distributed by the Office of the National Coordinator for health care IT advances.
“Here’s the strategy,” Halamka said. “Give $2 billion in grants to accelerate the industry. Give the industry a set of standards that are unambiguous for everything from medications, to labs, to quality measurements, to both clinical care and population health… Declare how hospitals and doctors have to use this wisely, and then certify products as being good enough to have the features and functions and capabilities to make this whole thing work.”
In the next five years as these standards are put into place, doctors and hospitals will be required to collect “meaningful” data and protect that data. “This is not using a word processor to record data!” Halamka clarified. “This is actually using codified mechanisms so that if you capture medications, problems, allergies, labs, etc. You could use them to inform drug discovery.”
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Main Culprit In Large Patient Information Breaches: Unencrypted Laptops
Dom Nicastro, for HealthLeaders Media, May 17, 2010
Perhaps it's time to make laptops look unappealing to thieves to prevent them from being stolen.
"A tongue-in-cheek solution—ugly, cumbersome, low-appeal devices," says Nancy Davis, director of privacy and security officer for Ministry Health Care in Sturgeon Bay, WI. "We had a suggestion . . . to paint them all mustard yellow."
Naturally, Davis and fellow HIPAA privacy and security officers and consultants have more serious ideas about securing laptops. And most agree—encryption is the safest way to ensure your patients' protected health information (PHI) is secured before it flies out the door.
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http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/051810dnbuspatientprivacy.1372a8f4.html
Hospitals criticized over offers to earn or save money by sharing electronic patient data
11:11 AM CDT on Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The landscape for electronic health records in North Texas and across the nation has changed dramatically during the first half of this year.
Every major health system in the area has implemented, or has budgeted to implement, a system for sharing patient records electronically.
Electronic records are expected to allow doctors to coordinate care for the sickest patients, eliminate paper-transcribing errors that lead to inaccurate prescriptions, and avoid duplicate lab and imaging tests.
Medical errors alone cost the country $37.6 billion each year, according to the Institute of Medicine, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health research group based in Washington, D.C.
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http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/health-it-consultants-demand
Health IT consultants in demand
May 18, 2010 | Bernie Monegain, Editor
OREM, UT – As healthcare organizations work to achieve meaningful use, demand for skilled consultants is high, but the jobs are more targeted and with smaller budgets than in the past, according to a new report from research firm KLAS.
The report, Shifting Demand for Consultants: Who's Hot, Who's Not, and Why, finds that nearly 70 percent of the 118 healthcare providers interviewed expect to hire a professional services firm to help with the demands of achieving meaningful use.
The study also notes that, in 2007, just five firms enjoyed significant provider mindshare, while today 13 do. Accenture, ACS, CTG, FCG (now CSC) and IBM now share mindshare with Vitalize, Dell Perot, maxIT and many others, as several key people left the top firms.
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Google Flu Trends Good At Suggesting, Not Pinpointing, Flu Cases
Google Flu Trends, the website that aims to track the spread of the flu by how many people are searching for terms related to the virus, is a guide to, rather than a finely tuned indicator of, actual cases of the flu.
That’s the conclusion, at least, of a study being presented at a meeting today of the American Thoracic Society. Researchers found that Google Flu Trends is very good at pointing out where people are experiencing flu-like symptoms. But, the abstract of the as-yet-unpublished study says, the web tool “has a lower correlation” with confirmed cases of the virus.
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http://www.imt.ie/news/2010/05/20plus_hospitals_now_operating.html
20-plus hospitals now operating IPMS
Gary Culliton
gary.culliton@imt.ie
More than 20 hospitals are now operating a single common patient administration system, HSE Hospital Network Manager John Hennessy has confirmed.
The €60 million Integrated Patient Management System (IPMS) is used to manage patient records and was originally intended to link up all HSE records nationwide to aid treatment of patients.
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http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9176892/E_health_and_Web_2.0_The_doctor_will_tweet_you_now
E-health and Web 2.0: The doctor will tweet you now
Patients can now meet their doctors in 'the cloud'
Lucas Mearian
May 20, 2010 (Computerworld)
When Janel Wood's 9-year-old son recently began experiencing migraines, the working mother decided to try a new company health care program that allowed her to communicate with a doctor through videoconferencing, voice over IP, and instant messaging.
While her son was home for lunch, Wood logged onto a local medical practice's Web site and connected via videoconferencing and IM with the doctor on duty, who then reviewed her son's electronic medical record (EMR) online. The doctor sent Wood links to migraine articles and podcasts and prescribed more hydration for her son, which worked over time.
"I ended up bringing [my son] back to school before missing any classes, which he was kind of bummed about. It was so quick and efficient," Wood said.
While telemedicine may seem a cold and impersonal approach to patient care, physicians say it's exactly the opposite. And they are quickly embracing it as a way to foster a more intimate relationship with patients and educate them about treatments prior to office visits.
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Healthcare Data Risk Greatest From Human Error
Despite advances in security technology and regulations, human mistakes will likely continue to cause data security breaches that jeopardize patient privacy.
By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek
May 20, 2010
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224900435
Human foibles will likely continue to cause data security breaches despite advances in the security technology until users fully understand the risks involved with their behavior, said healthcare CIOs at during an e-health panel at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Mass. on Wednesdays.
While advancements in security technology better protects patient data, and regulations like HIPAA aim to set rules for information security and privacy, some breaches boil down to humans making mistakes.
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http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/data-storage-top-concern-healthcare-providers
Data storage of top concern to healthcare providers
May 19, 2010 | Kyle Hardy, Community Editor
SANTA CLARA, CA – With the introduction of electronic health records, health data storage is expected to be high on providers' to-do lists. However, storing this data will be challenging, said Bill Burns, senior director for Hitachi Data Systems.
"The problem is split into two parts," said Burns. "The first 50 percent of the problem is the IT issue – how do I manage, back up, secure it? The second is how to integrate the technology with other applications at the provider's facility."
Burns said that when it comes to data in healthcare, he is seeing a trend shift. The largest amount of data (Excel files, videos, clinical images) are what is called unstructured file data, said Burns. This kind of data is expected to grow with the digitization of medical records and will be hard to store and secure.
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http://govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=73774
Federal policy workgroup to focus on state HIE
By Nancy Ferris
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
A Health IT Policy Committee workgroup will focus its attention on state-level health information exchange issues, after identifying those that need policy solutions.
Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, told the federal Health IT Policy Committee Wednesday that the information exchange workgroup, which he co-chairs, will narrow its focus on state HIEs as early adopters begin to set them up.
In a brief report to the Policy Committee, Tripathi said many HIE issues may arise at the state level and at the intersections of state and federal HIT implementations.
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Execs View Telehealth As Game Changer
Telehealth will transform healthcare, but reimbursement models, fear of technology are barriers to adoption, study shows.
By Nicole Lewis, InformationWeek
May 19, 2010
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224900404
Through the use of telehealth technology, the U.S. healthcare delivery systems will undergo a significant transformation that will improve healthcare outcomes and cut costs, a new study shows.
The study, conducted by research firm Penn Schoen Berland on behalf of Intel, interviewed 75 C-level executives at hospitals, home health organizations, and insurance companies. Among the findings, 89% of healthcare decision makers believe telehealth will transform healthcare in the next 10 years.
The study also revealed that telehealth solutions, which deliver health-related services and information via telecommunications and computing technologies, are currently being used by two-thirds of healthcare professionals with an 87% satisfaction rate.
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P2P networks a treasure trove of leaked health care data, study finds
Eight months after passage of HITECH Act, data leaks still a problem in health care industry
Jaikumar Vijayan
May 17, 2010 (Computerworld)
Nearly eight months after new rules were enacted requiring stronger protection of health care information, organizations are still leaking such data on file-sharing networks, a study by Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business has found.
In a research paper to be presented at an IEEE security symposium Tuesday, a Dartmouth College professor Eric Johnson will describe how university researchers discovered thousands of documents containing sensitive patient information on popular peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.
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http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/The-Big-Business-of-Electronic-Health-Records-Part-2-70016.html
The Big Business of Electronic Health Records, Part 2
Proposed federal regulations for obtaining funding could actually stymie the adoption of EHR programs, say critics. "While the proposed rules would push the industry forward through a challenging set of requirements, we have concerns that the proposals do not accurately reflect the amount of time it will take providers of all sizes to efficiently prepare to demonstrate 'meaningful use,'" said the eHealth Initiative's Diane Jones.
Part 1 of this series discusses the growing trend toward adoption of electronic health records among healthcare providers, insurance companies, and government agencies.
The U.S. healthcare sector is about to embark on a multibillion dollar information technology investment program to provide electronic medical records for tens of millions of patients.
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http://www.e-health-insider.com/news/5929/decision_day_for_morecambe_bay
Decision day for Morecambe Bay
21 May 2010
D-Day has arrived for University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust on whether it is allowed to proceed with plans to bcome the first acute hospital to take the delayed Lorenzo hospital information system.
NHS chief information officer Christine Connelly is due to decide today whether to give University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust her approval to go-live with iSoft Lorenzo.
E-Health Insider under understands that Connelly will today again personally visit the hospital trust, the latest in a series of visits to the Northwest hospital trust.
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A Paradigm Shift on Quality Reporting
CIOs grapple with challenges of moving quality reporting to electronic health record systems.
By David Raths
Hospital CIOs have identified quality reporting from electronic health record (EHR) systems as one of their greatest challenges related to meaningful use compliance under the federal American Reinvestment and Recovery Act/Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (ARRA-HITECH) Act. In March, David Muntz, senior vice president and CIO of the Baylor Health Care System in Dallas, told the federal Office of the National Coordinator Standards Implementation Workgroup that the most significant impact of meeting meaningful use on his health system’s existing plan has to do with the required quality reporting. Baylor eventually would like the activities of documentation and ordering to produce the data it currently collects manually through chart abstraction. But he added, “If we rush to meet the Stage 1 criteria before we have deployed our enterprise-wide designed EHR in our hospitals and ambulatory settings, we will have to sub-optimize our processes to gather some of the numerators and denominators required to compute the proposed metrics.”
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http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/colorado-hie-medicity-hitech-40311-1.html
Colorado Picks its HIE Partner
HDM Breaking News, May 20, 2010
The Colorado Regional Health Information Organization has selected Medicity Inc. as the core platform vendor for the state's health information exchange.
The RHIO will start implementation in the San Luis Valley region, which spans 8,000 square miles in southern Colorado and includes the towns of Del Norte, Monte Vista, Alamosa and San Luis. A second phase is expected this summer with letters of intent received from Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs and the northern Colorado region.
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http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/hie-ehr-illinois-hospital-physician-40304-1.html
Northern Illinois Gets an HIE
HDM Breaking News, May 18, 2010
Centegra Health System, serving northern Illinois with hospitals in McHenry and Woodstock, will create a health information exchange with community physicians.
The delivery system also will offer electronic health records software to physicians not yet using the technology. Centegra will implement the Elysium Exchange HIE platform software of Axolotl Corp., San Jose, Calif., which includes the CCHIT-certified Elysium 9 ambulatory EHR.
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EHRs must support two distinct types of care, Partners CIO says
May 20, 2010 — 11:23am ET | By Neil Versel
Ever notice how so many examples of how EHRs can improve care focus on diabetes? That's because diabetes care has many clear protocols, copious amounts of scientific evidence that gets included in clinical decision support and clear quality measures.
But not all care is like diabetes care, as Partners HealthCare System CIO John Glaser notes in Hospitals & Health Networks. "The outcomes of a stroke are variable and difficult to measure. There are often no crisp guidelines for treating the fragile, elderly patients with multiple chronic diseases. And it would be a challenge to adequately structure the documentation of the clinician's thought process for a patient with a rare disease that is eluding diagnosis," Glaser writes in one of his regular columns for the magazine.
According to Glaser, healthcare can be broken down into iterative care--making diagnoses--and sequential care, which involves following widely accepted patterns of treatment. "The EHR must accommodate this diversity within an organization as well as for an individual clinician (a clinician may see this diversity daily) and for a patient (any patient may move from iterative care to sequential care and back again)," he writes.
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http://www.fierceemr.com/story/hospital-cpoe-collaborative-market-order-sets-zynx/2010-05-20
Hospital CPOE collaborative to market order sets via Zynx
May 20, 2010 — 1:10pm ET | By Neil Versel
Three major health systems that have jointly developed more than 1,000 clinical order sets are joining with Zynx Health to market the order sets to other providers implementing computerized physician order entry.
"CPOE is hard," Dr. Loren Hauck, senior VP and CMO of Adventist Health System, Winter Park, Fla., tells FierceEMR. "We want to share our learning and best practices with others that may not be as far along" toward achieving meaningful use of EMRs.
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http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20100519/NEWS/100519927
HHS to survey Medicare patients on PHR use
By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer
Posted: May 19, 2010 - 11:30 am ET
Seventeen months after launching a pilot project to test whether Medicare beneficiaries will use personal health records, HHS is going back to Utah and Arizona to ask PHR users what they think about the systems.
HHS last week published official notice in the Federal Register of its intent to conduct an evaluation this fall of the pilot program, including a survey of 500 Medicare beneficiaries to assess user satisfaction, as well as barriers or facilitators of PHR use.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37363.html
Resisting the push to digitize
Electronic health records are often discussed as a panacea in health policy, with the potential to streamline record keeping, reduce costs and improve quality of care in one fell swoop.
So it’s no surprise that the federal government has propped up the industry with $19 billion for health information technology from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and bolstered that support with provisions in the health care reform law.
But as a particularly stringent and new regulation nears, numerous medical groups say that the aggressive government push to digitize is too much, too soon. Health information technology in the United States remains highly fragmented, so any large overhauls, experts warn, must work on a timeline that stretches years into the future.
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http://www.ehiprimarycare.com/news/5913/pcts_look_for_gp_agreement_to_scr
PCTs look for GP agreement to SCR
18 May 2010
Primary care trusts are seeking agreement from GP practices to go ahead with the creation of Summary Care Records in areas where their roll-out had been suspended.
NHS East of England told EHI Primary Care that the process to create SCRs will go-ahead in areas where agreement has been reached on whether adequate information has been provided to patients and practices.
A spokesperson added: “The process to reach agreement that adequate information has been provided is ongoing.”
In a letter to PCT chief executives sent in April Dave Marsden, director of strategic IM&T, said the SHA's assurance of PCT communication plans would be strengthened following the BMA's concerns and no SCRs would be created for a practice until it was content that it had been "fully briefed" and patients informed of their choices.
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http://www.ehiprimarycare.com/news/5917/gp_labels_scr_up-load_a_%27disaster%27
GP labels SCR up-load a 'disaster'
18 May 2010
A GP whose practice has just uploaded Summary Care Records has heavily criticised the process, which she claims has been a "disaster."
Dr Linda Parker is a principal at one of four GP practices based at Roebuck House in Hastings, East Sussex, which have begun uploading records over the past two to three weeks.
Dr Parker told EHI Primary Care that the upload had been “a complete disaster for the practice” with large numbers of patients reporting no knowledge of the Public Information Programme.
She said: “I have had a lot of patients saying they haven’t received a letter when I have asked them about it and none of my own neighbours have received a letter.”
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http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20100518/NEWS/100519932
Poll finds e-communications are in demand
By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer
Posted: May 18, 2010 - 11:30 am ET
About half of the parents of children ages 17 or younger in a recent national survey indicated that they'd like to communicate online with their child's physician's office for such clinical and administrative purposes as requesting records or refilling a prescription.
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http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20100518/NEWS/100519930
Online physician ratings mostly positive: study
By Andis Robeznieks / HITS staff writer
Posted: May 18, 2010 - 11:30 am ET
Few patients are posting online reviews of their physicians and, among those that do, most of the reviews they write are positive, according to a study published on the Journal of General Internal Medicine's website.
Tara Lagu, a Tufts University School of Medicine assistant professor, and colleagues at the Center for Quality of Care Research at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., took a random sample of 300 Boston-area doctors and searched for reviews posted by their patients on 33 physician-rating websites. They found 190 reviews for 81 of the physicians in the sample with 88% of the reviews positive, 6% negative and 6% considered neutral.
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http://www.govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=73735
Civil rights office steps up health privacy enforcement
By Mary Mosquera
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The HITECH Act significantly strengthened the available legal tools for enforcing health information privacy law, according federal health officials, who pledged to step up their pursuit of health security and privacy rule violators.
Last year’s health IT law tightened the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s (HIPAA) security and privacy rules, increased fines, and centralized oversight in HHS’ Office of Civil Rights. OCR, which issued an enforcement rule that took effect in November, can now impose penalties of up to $1.5 million per violation.
“OCR has significantly strengthened tools with which to obtain compliance,” said Marilou King, senior attorney and acting senior advisor for privacy compliance and enforcement in HHS’s Office of General Counsel Civil Rights Division.
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http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/blogs/blog_Gillespie_telehealth_American_Well-40293-1.html
Tackling Health Care’s Scheduling Problem
Health Data Management Blogs, May 17, 2010
Sometimes someone really hits the nail on the head. And I think Roy Schoenberg, M.D., CEO of American Well, did when I recently spoke with him about consumer disconnect.
The timing was perfect because I had recently suffered that disconnect. I had a horrific sinus infection, the same one I get every spring, and called my primary care doctor. A nurse got back to me, listened to my litany of complaints and told me that I couldn’t get a prescription over the phone. By that time I saw a doctor three days later and got my diagnosis confirmed I already had an ear infection. And to add to my misery I was away from my job, this job I so dearly love, for a half-day.
The way Roy sees it, and I wholeheartedly agree, is that we don’t so much have a technology or expertise problem when it comes to providing care; we have a chronic scheduling problem. Proving the most timely and high-impact so often hinges on everyone--providers, technicians, patients, families--being in the right place at the right time. And, let’s be honest, that takes a miracle and the whole process is so often unnecessary. I as a consumer have a lot of technology at my fingertips, as do doctors and nurses. No reason it shouldn’t be put to good use when I have a sinus infection and no car, and a doc has an hour of free time to check in online.
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http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/security-federal-trade-commission-breach-40278-1.html
Security: Strive for 'Defensive Depth'
HDM Breaking News, May 13, 2010
Good data security means having "defensive depth" embedded in information systems, says Alain Sheer, an attorney in the Federal Trade Commission's division of privacy and identity protection. "Relying on one defense is problematic."
Speaking at the Safeguarding Health Information Conference in Washington, Sheer gave examples of the need for multiple levels of defense. An organization, for instance, may encrypt data but have weak user authentication controls. This enables a hacker to access the encryption module and find the decryption key.
Sheer also gave several examples of major breaches of well-known retailers who were amazingly lax in protecting sensitive consumer information. Petco Animal Supply, for instance, on its Web site collected consumers' names, addresses, and payment card numbers with expiration dates. The Web site stated that data was encrypted, but it was not. The FTC charged the company with deception and in a settlement order mandated a comprehensive information security plan and independent assessments of Petco's security measures every three years for 20 years.
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http://govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=73747
HHS to study patient perceptions of health IT
By Mary Mosquera
Friday, May 14, 2010
The Health and Human Services Department will conduct two surveys to find out more about patient perceptions and preferences for the use of health IT in the course of their healthcare.
HHS said it knows little about patient perceptions of practices that use electronic health records (EHRs) or about patient preferences about what functions they want from a personal health record (PHR).
HHS announced the two studies in the May 14 Federal Register.
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http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20100517/NEWS/100519941
Blumenthal offers meaningful-use approaches
By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer
Posted: May 17, 2010 - 11:30 am ET
David Blumenthal, head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, took to e-mail and the Web last week to get the word out about an alternative way for providers to communicate to meet federal meaningful-use requirements and qualify for billions of dollars in health IT payments.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus law, requires that providers must meaningfully use an electronic health-record system to qualify for up to an estimated $27.3 billion in federal reimbursements.
Last December, the CMS, which will administer the EHR funding under the Medicare and Medicare Advantage programs, issued a proposed rule defining the meaning of meaningful use. Congress, however, mandated three meaningful-use criteria that providers must meet—electronic prescribing, reporting quality measures to HHS and exchanging information electronically to improve patient care.
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http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/breach-va-congress-letter-buyer-40290-1.html
Rep. Buyer: Why Isn't VA Data Encrypted?
HDM Breaking News, May 17, 2010
Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), ranking member of the U.S. House Committee on Veterans Affairs, has sent a letter to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki expressing his "deepest" concern over the recent theft of an unencrypted laptop from a VA contractor, and the department's information security procedures.
Information Week first reported on the laptop theft. It was stolen from a personal vehicle on April 22 and contained sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, on more than 600 veterans receiving pharmacy services.
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Study: Health IT, care coordination key to meeting national cholesterol guidelines
May 14, 2010 | Molly Merrill, Associate Editor
DENVER – Kaiser Permanente is crediting healthcare information technology and care coordination as helping more than 40 percent of very high-risk patients reach national cholesterol guidelines – a feat that past studies indicate is difficult to achieve.
In 2004 the National Cholesterol Education Program issued revised cholesterol goals recommending people at very high-risk for heart disease move their target LDL or "bad" cholesterol from 100 mg/dL to 70 mg/dL to reduce the risk for another heart attack.
Many health experts have questioned the legitimacy of such an aggressive goal. Previous research has found only between 15 and 30 percent of patients were able to get their cholesterol to the recommended goal.
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http://www.ihealthbeat.org/perspectives/2010/in-search-of-health-information-exchange.aspx
Monday, May 17, 2010
In Search of ... Health Information Exchange
Californians think big -- as the seventh largest economy in the world we have to. And as one might expect we boast some of the biggest health IT successes and failures.
Kaiser Permanente recently completed a $4 billion-plus electronic health record initiative -- considered the largest completed civilian health IT project in the country.
While I was at the California HealthCare Foundation, I witnessed firsthand the market failure that led to the closure of the $10 million Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange. Its closure taught us that health information exchange was not exempt from the power of market forces.
While grants can be critical to initiate efforts, they are insufficient to sustain them. It is now painfully clear that we need to better understand and respect market forces and harness them to our advantage. In other words, we need to know our customers and provide valuable services worth paying for.
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http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/05/ehealth_laggard.html
E-Health Laggards Need To Start Moving Now
, May 17, 2010 03:59 PM
Healthcare providers starting from scratch with projects to implement e-health record systems in hopes of cashing in on the government's $20 billion-plus meaningful use incentive programs had better get going.
It's going to take a while for healthcare providers to get those systems running and users trained on them, let along using their new digital records, e-prescribing, computerized order-entry and other applications in the "meaningful" ways the federal government will require before it sends out HITECH rewards to doctors and hospitals.
Certainly, healthcare providers are in a bit of a quandary: Even though the government's health IT financial incentives begin kicking in next year, the "meaningful use" compliance requirements for qualifying for those rewards aren't even settled yet, and it's already mid-2010. The Dept. of Health and Human Services expects the rules to be finalized and published by "end of spring."
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Enjoy!
David.
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