When there are so many moving parts, just how secure is patient data?
Friday, August 13, 2010 at 9:36:00 AM
 Four Massachusetts community hospitals are investigating how thousands of patient health records, some containing Social Security numbers and sensitive medical diagnoses, ended up in a pile at a public dump.
The unshredded records included pathology reports with patients’ names, addresses, and results of breast, bone, and skin cancer tests, as well as the results of lab work following miscarriages. By law, medical records and documents containing personal identifying information must be disposed of in a way that protects privacy, and leaving them at a dump is probably illegal, privacy lawyers and hospital officials said. Violators face steep fines.
A Globe photographer discovered the records July 26 when he was dumping his trash at the Georgetown Transfer Station. When he got out of his car, he said, he saw a huge pile of paper about 20 feet wide by 20 feet long. Upset that the paper wasn’t being recycled, he looked more closely.
See tne entire article at Boston.com
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Thursday, July 01, 2010 at 12:00:00 AM
 Eight out of 10 hospital CIOs recently surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said they're concerned they will not be able to demonstrate "meaningful use" of electronic health records (EHRs) -- and therefore won't qualify for federal reimbursements for rolling out the technology.
Ninety-four percent of CIOs in the survey released Tuesday said they are concerned they can't meet government requirements about how to report meaningful use of EHRs, and 92 percent are concerned about a lack of clarity in the criteria used by the government.
Last year, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) set aside $36 billion to help hospitals and doctors purchase equipment to computerize patient medical records, but even the most sophisticated hospitals in the country are struggling to qualify for the payments, PwC's study indicated. Clinicians and hospitals that deploy the technology and prove that it meets a set of government "meaningful use" standards showing it's being effectively used can receive up to $44,000 per doctor in reimbursement funds b...
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Friday, October 23, 2009 at 12:00:00 AM
 Lawrence General Hospital's Dr. Neil Meehan credits an electronic system, ED PulseCheck, sold by Wakefield-based Picis Inc., with reducing ER wait times by more than 30 minutes. The technology has saved $600,000 this past year in transcription services for dictated ER medical records and brought in $5 million in additional revenue.
See full article at Mass High Tech.
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State helping to shape US efforts to digitize health records for all
Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 2:14:00 AM
 According to John Halamka, chief information officer at CareGroup Healthcare System, “The average use of EMRs in the US is between 2 and 20 percent. In Massachusetts, we’re somewhere between 30 and 50 percent, so we’ve had a fair degree of experience with what works and what doesn’t work.’’
Halamka is cochair of a committee that will help Blumenthal determine a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for electronic medical records - essentially, what features do they need in order to be government-certified.
Full Article On Boston.Com: State helping to shape US efforts to digitize health records for all
Massachusetts won influence because Harvard economist David Cutler was the primary architect of candidate Barack Obama’s healthcare plan. “Cutler sort of dreamed up the idea of spending $50 billion or so on healthcare IT as part of Obama’s platform, when Obama wasn...
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Tuesday, July 07, 2009 at 12:36:00 AM
 By the best count, only 1.5 percent of the nation's roughly 6,000 hospitals use a comprehensive electronic record.
Even that statistic belies how hard it will be for health care to jettison its 19th-century filing system by 2014, the federal government's goal — despite the $19 billion that the economic stimulus package is providing to help doctors start. It took Children's seven hard years and more than $10 million to evolve a system that lets its doctors check on patients with a few mouse clicks from anywhere and use speedily up-to-date records in directing their care....
From Google News/AP: Paperless health care? A hospital's long journey.
...A study in the New England Journal of Medicine this spring named hospitals' top two reasons for not going digital."
When you walk into a hospital, you're like, 'Whoa, I'm back in the 1970s,'" said lead researcher Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health. Younger patients growing ...
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