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Written by Justine Cadet
ATLANTA—Whether enough is being done to protect the rights of patient data, while simultaneously allowing for health information to be exchanged amongst care providers under the proposed meaningful use definitions, became an area of contention during today's Meaningful Use Town Hall discussion during the CIO Forum, co-hosted by CHIME and HIMSS, at the HIMSS10 conference.
A qualitative study conducted by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston revealed that patients want full access to all of their medical records; are willing to make some privacy concessions in the interest of making their medical records completely transparent; and expect that computers may one day substitute for face-to-face doctor visits.
Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Hospital in Bellflower, Calif., has been fined $250,000 for unauthorized employee access to the medical records of Nadya Suleman, the woman who gave birth to octuplets in January this year.
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It is not appropriate to make a broad recommendation for a public disclosure process for adverse events in hospitals, according to a recent memorandum from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Federal authorities have launched an investigation into the theft of patient information as part of a scheme to make fake Virginia driver's licenses by a former employee of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
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The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule of meaningful use.
In 2006, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the FDA, began examining the number of medical device reports they received. Over the past two years, the number of submitted reports has increased, sparking a demand for the CDRH to make a move to electronic reporting.
A new hospital breaking ground usually isn’t breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.