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Data breaches cost organizations a staggering $156.7billion over six years
06 September 2011
Data breaches costorganizations $156.7 billion over a six-year period, according to new data breachstudy by Digital Forensics Association.
The study presentsdata breach information collected from 2005 through 2010, including thedisclosure of more than 800 million records over that period. The associationsaid the overall data breach dollar figure did not include the costs that theorganizations downstream or upstream incurred, or the losses sustained by thedata breach victims. Further, the report, TheLeaking Vault 2011, said the data breach cost estimate waslow because 35% of the incidents did not name a figure for records lost.
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S.F. experiment in improving patient health care
Monday,September 5, 2011
Researchers longago established that certain medical procedures are performed at dramaticallydifferent rates from place to place, and that these disparities affect thequality and cost of health care.
Now, healthinsurers, hospitals and government agencies from the Bay Area to Washington,D.C., are getting more aggressive about tackling variation in medical care.
The issue willsurface in San Francisco with a collaboration that started this summer amongBlue Shield of California and some local hospitals and physicians, aimed atbetter coordination of patient care for about 26,000 public employees.
The partnership ismodeled after a similar one in the Sacramento region whose early efforts torein in variation resulted in training doctors in newer medical techniques andoffering patients less-invasive treatment options.
In the case ofweight-loss surgeries, procedures fell in one year by 13 percent.
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Spurring the market for high-tech home health care
A daunting array offinancial and operational barriers is holding back growth. What can be done?
September2011 • Basel Kayyali, Zeb Kimmel, and Steve van Kuiken
Onthe surface,technology-enabled home health care should be thriving in the United States.The country’s aging population and the transformation of acute illnesses suchas heart failure into chronic diseases mean that the number of patients isgrowing. In addition, new medical-technology devices could help keep patientsat home rather than in costly institutions, such as assisted-living facilitiesor nursing homes—leading to potentially big savings for the health care system.
Instead, the fullpotential of the technology-enabled home health care market remains to betapped. In the United States, home care accounts for about 3 percent ($68billion a year) of national health spending. The market is increasing by about9 percent annually,1solid but hardly booming growth, especially since labor (mainly nurses andaides) accounts for about two-thirds2of the expenditure and home-monitoring technology represents a small fractionof it. What’s holding the market back? We observe a daunting array of financialand operational barriers, including the misalignment of incentives betweenpayers and providers, the need to demonstrate a strong clinical value proposition,and the problem of designing attractive, easy-to-use products that facilitateadoption by patients.
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Telemonitoring Pilot Attacks Diabetes
Health informationexchange's project aims to keep diabetic patients out of the ER; if it works,the technology could pay for itself.
By Ken Terry, InformationWeek
September 08, 2011
As part of a largerproject to reduce the burden of diabetes on patients in western New York,Buffalo-based health information exchange HealtheLink has launched a pilot totest the effect of telemonitoring on diabetics' health. A premise of the18-month pilot is that telemonitoring will pay for itself by reducing theenrolled patients' emergency room and doctor visits.
While the evidencefor that remains uncertain, the pilot is set up tomeasure clinical and claims data for the study group and compare it to datafrom a control group of similar patients, Todd Norris, western New York BeaconProject director for HealtheLink, told InformationWeekHealthcare. HealtheLink will make quarterly reports to the Officeof the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC), which is funding the studythrough its Beacon Communitiesprogram. The study will end March 31, 2013.
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Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record pilot expands toinclude more veterans
September 08, 2011 |Molly Merrill, Associate Editor
WASHINGTON – Thepilot for the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER), which enables sharingof Veterans' health records will be expanded, the Department of VeteransAffairs announced Thursday.
"The expansionof the VLER pilot program will allow more Veterans and facilities toparticipate in this exciting new technology," said Secretary of VeteransAffairs Eric K. Shinseki. "I invite Veterans to sign up for the program.It will keep health care providers informed, improve continuity and timelinessof care, and eliminate gaps in healthcare information."
VLER is amulti-faceted business and technology initiative that includes a portfolio ofhealth, benefits, personnel and administrative information sharingcapabilities.
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HIE Vendor Market Poised For Shakeup
Among dozens ofvendors selling technology products and services to health informationexchanges, no clear player dominates, study says.
By MarianneKolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek
September 07, 2011
The health informationexchange (HIE) vendor market is still very fragmented, with more than threedozen companies identified as providing IT products and services to these datasharing initiatives, according to a new report.
Of the 35 vendorsHIEs named as product and services providers, no vendor has a majority footholdyet, according to a new report released by theeHealth Initiative, which recently surveyed 196 of the 255 HIEs currentlyoperating in the United States. The HIEs surveyed ranged from state-runinitiatives to community-based organizations, including for-profit andnon-profit efforts.
Leading the pack isAxolotl, which provides products and services to 22 of the 196 (about 11%)surveyed HIEs. Axolotl was recently renamed OptumInsight, and is part ofUnitedHealth Group's health IT services business. The next most prevalent HIEvendor is Medicity, being used in 14initiatives, followed by a tie between Cerner and Mirth, with each providingproducts and services to nine HIEs.
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Making the Most of Meaningful Use
HealthData Management Magazine, 09/01/2011
On one level, themeaningful use electronic record incentive program is all about the money. Manyproviders, especially small practices, jumped head first into the programbecause the financial incentives made it possible to automate at little or nocost-if they got those incentive checks.
Take Springfield(Ohio) Center for Family Medicine, where all six physicians have attested tomeaningful use, with four by mid-July having received $18,000 first-year checksfrom the Medicare incentive program, and the other two awaiting payment.
That money isalready flowing downstream at the practice, which purchased a documentmanagement and imaging system along with workstations, all integrated with theelectronic records and practice management systems of Horsham, Pa.-basedNextGen Healthcare Information Systems, says Cindy Brewer, office manager. TheEHR and the purchase of ancillary technology would not have been done withoutthe incentive payments, she adds. "We've wanted to do it but didn't knowwhen the finances were going to be there."
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ONC debuts new HealthIT.gov
Posted: September 8, 2011 - 12:00 pm ET
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health InformationTechnology on Thursday announced the launch of its new HealthIT.gov websitetargeting consumers as well as healthcare providers.
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SE Essex develops EPR for COPD patients
8 September2011 Shanna Crispin
NHS South EastEssex has created a shared electronic patient record across primary, secondaryand community care for patients with COPD.
The primary caretrust decided some years ago to develop an integrated primary care systemstrategy.
This involvedmoving the majority of its GP practices onto the hosted SystmOne GP, anddeploying SystmOne systems into its community services and prison.
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EMRs go mobile: Not to be ignored
September 6, 2011 — 5:38pm ET | By Dan Bowman
Although accessibility of electronicmedical records (EMR) on tablet devices is nothing new (we've been reporting onsuch capabilities as far back as April 2010), thatdoesn't make recent announcements from drchrono, Epocrates, GE, Greenway Medical Technologies and SAP about their mobile EMRofferings any less important. Rather, it reaffirms thenotion that mobility in healthcare is king, something all current andfuture EMR vendors would be wise to take note of.
The users, doctors and other medical professionals, are flocking tothe iPad and devices like it in droves. In May, Manhattan Research concluded that 75 percent ofU.S. physicians owned an Apple mobile device in one form or another.
More recently, the medical schools at Ivy League heavyweights Harvard and Yale each announced itsown mobility news. Harvard is creating a set of apps specifically for medstudents, and Yale has handed out 520 iPads to its students.
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Cloud-based EMRs offer improved data security
September 6, 2011 —5:33pm ET | By MarlaDurben Hirsch - Contributing Editor
Cloud-basedelectronic medical record systems may not be as vulnerable to security breachesas once thought, as more vendors begin to offer these systems as an option andinformation is made available about how they operate.
There has been someindustry concern, if a Physicians Practice blogpost is any indication, that cloud-based EMRsystems, which operate on the web rather than on site at a provider, were morevulnerable to cyber attacks and other security risks. But that's notnecessarily true, according to Sheldon Needle, president of CTSGuides, asoftware screening and referral service. Needle recently posted onhis own blog, comparing the two types of systems.
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Thursday, September 8, 2011
Internet VCs Circle Health Care
SiliconValley investors helped reinvent everything from sharing photos to buying booksonline. Now can they fix health care?
Some prominentventure capitalists are betting that the Internet strategies that createdgiants such as eBay and PayPal could reshape the ailing U.S. health-caresystem. That system currently devours 18 percent of the world's largest GDPwhile delivering mediocre health results.
In August, theonline health marketplace ZocDoc, which lets patients look up doctors by specialtyand zip code and make appointments over the Internet, raised $50 million fromthe investment fund of Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who in the past hasbacked companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon.
The idea behindZocDoc and other startups getting funding is that our costly, paper-basedhealth-care system is ripe for the same technological fixes—such as datavisualization, cloud computing, and mass-market self-service concepts—that havetransformed industries such as consumer banking and travel.
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NYC Program Shows EHRs Can Boost Preventive Care
Program led byFarzad Mostashari, before he became national health IT coordinator, supportsentering structured data into an EHR to monitor a population's health.
By Ken Terry, InformationWeek
September 06, 2011
In a New York Cityprogram that subsidized doctors' electronic health records (EHRs) in return forsharing quality data with the city, physicians showed significant improvementson eight of 10 preventive care indicators, according to a new study in the Journalof the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).
The findingsprovide some perspectives on the federal government's Meaningful Use program,which requires attestation-of-quality data this year and electronic reportingin 2012. Not coincidently, the national coordinator of health IT, FarzadMostashari, MD, who has responsibility for implementing the federal incentiveprogram, led the team that created the New York EHR program when he was assistantcommissioner of the city's department of health andmental hygiene.
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Hurricane Irene Sparks Talk Of HIT Disaster Strategy
Health IT managersare looking at the damage done and reassessing their disaster planningstrategies.
By NicoleLewis, InformationWeek
September 06, 2011
Like other naturaldisasters before it, Hurricane Irene disrupted hospital services in theNortheast, causing hospital IT officials to once again mull their disasterpreparedness strategies.
Several recentreports in the aftermath of Irene show how damaging hurricanes can be tohospital systems. At Johnson MemorialMedical Center in Stafford Springs, Conn., 43 patientswere relocated to other medical facilities when the hospital lost power andutility workers were prevented from fixing the problem because of theapproaching storm.
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More than 30,000 health-records breaches since 2009: HHS
Posted: September 7, 2011 - 12:01 am ET
The medical records of about 7.9 million people have been exposed inmore than 30,750 healthcare-related security breaches since breach notificationrequirements took effect two years ago, according to a report by the HHSsecretary and the Office for Civil Rights at HHS.
The vast majority of the breaches—more than 30,500 of them—wererelatively small-scale mishaps that involved fewer than 500 records each andcollectively accounted for the unauthorized disclosure of the records ofroughly 62,000 individuals, according to the report toCongress (PDF).
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ONC Tackling Population Data Query Issues
HDMBreaking News, September 7, 2011
The Office of theNational Coordinator for Health Information Technology has launched QueryHealth, an initiative to establish standards for querying widely distributeddata sources such as electronic health records.
Three workgroups,with membership being solicited, will cover business, clinical, and technicalimplementation issues. The business work group will handle privacy, security,consent, sustainability, data use arrangements and best practices. The clinicalwork group will develop use cases, functional requirements, and standards foran information model, query syntax and results expression. The technicalworkgroup is responsible for implementation of Query Health and support ofpilot projects.
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ONC launches Query Health data-sharing program
Posted: September 8, 2011 - 12:00 pm ET
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health InformationTechnology formally introduced its Query Health data-sharing program. Theprogram is part of its standards and interoperability framework—an initiativeto promote health information exchange.
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CONNECT issues latest iteration of open source HIEsoftware
September 06, 2011 | TomSullivan, Editor
Health informationexchanges running the CONNECT platform take note: The CONNECT team has issued anew version, 3.2.1, which fixes a number of bugs and known issues.
The open sourcesoftware taps National Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) standards andprotocols to enable the creation of an HIE and the exchanging of healthcareinformation, both regionally and on a national level.
Connect 3.2.1corrects known problems, and the latest iteration can correlate multipleresponses for patient discovery, defer patient discover requests and makepolicy checks inside the gateway and refactor deferred services implementation.
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Health Care IT Departments Must Adopt Mobile Strategies:CSC
2011-09-02
As physicians use mobiledevices in large numbers, IT departments at health care organizations need astrategy to support them, according to a new CSC report.
CSC, an IT integratorand cloud-service provider, has released a new report suggesting that healthcare IT departments should act fast to support the mobile devices thatphysicians are using.
Doctors areadopting smartphones at more than twice the rate of the general population,according to CSC's report, called "Harnessing the Value of mHealth forYour Organization." More than 17,000 health care apps are available forsmartphones, the company said.
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KLAS Finds Enterprise Players Making OncologyInroads
Postedby Anthony Guerra on September 6th, 2011
Looking for greaterintegration with other core clinical applications, providers have invitedenterprise HIT vendors to enter the Oncology arena, according to a new KLASreport Oncology IS 2011: Integrating the Island.
The specialty isone fraught with information silos, due to physicians moving between hospitalsand clinics, and patients moving between infusion suites and radiation oncologyfacilities.
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Wednesday, September 7, 2011
E-Medicine's Perfect Storm
Alook, in numbers, at the forces shaping electronic medicine.
A recent video thatappeared on YouTube.com asked: What if air travel worked like healthcare?
The hilariousanswer (here) shows an imaginarytraveler attempting to book a flight to Eugene, Oregon on Air HealthCare. Frustration mounts as he's instead offered a flight to Chicago for$17,885, but only if he first faxes in his "complete flight history."
There are plenty ofreasons that health care isn't as automated as airline reservations or checkprocessing. Each person's health situation is, if not unique, immenselypersonal. Would anyone want to book radiation treatment on a medical Orbitz?
Even so, automatingthe collection and processing of medical information is an huge opportunity forhospitals and software companies. The U.S. medical establishment has yet touniversalize even simple look-ups, such as what drugs a patient is taking, andhas only begun to harness such phenomena as cell-phone apps and Web 2.0 trendslike crowd sourcing to improve health care.
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Healthcare is IT's new frontier in Asia
o AvantiKumar
07.09.2011 kl 00:14 | MISAsia
The adoption ofinformation technology (IT) in the healthcare industry is speeding up, drivenin part by cloud computing, according to Asia-based healthcare IT solutionsprovider iSOFT Health Asia.
The adoption ofinformation technology (IT) in the healthcare industry is speeding up, drivenin part by cloud computing, according to Asia-based healthcare IT solutionsprovider iSOFT Health Asia.
iSOFT Health Asiageneral manager Dr Timothy Nam said the healthcare industry has been slowerthan other sectors in adopting IT solutions. "Having to manage, as well asmaintain, healthcare's legacy systems and upkeep its traditional bestpractices, many called the health sector extremely backward. In fact, quite anumber of observers have declared it as being 20 years behind the bankingsector."
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Q&A: Between the lines of NEJM EHR report - 'Trusttrumps technology' for EHR success, authors say
September 01, 2011 | TomSullivan, Editor
Distinguishingitself from previous efforts to prove the viability of EHRs and meaningful use,a studypublished Wednesday in the NewEngland Journal of Medicine shed light on justwhat can be accomplished by using electronic medical records rather than paperrecords.
The finding: Asurvey of 27,000 adult diabetics spanning 500 primary care physicians across 46practices in the Cleveland area found that those practices employing EHRsearned “annual improvements in healthcare that were 10 percent greater thantheir paper-based counterparts,” and their patients were “significantly morelikely to have healthcare and outcomes that align with accepted standards thanthose where doctors rely on paper records.”
Government HealthITEditor Tom Sullivan interviewed two of the study’s authors – Randall Cebul,director of the Center for Healthcare Research and Policy at MetroHealthMedical Center and a professor of medicine, epidemiology and biostatistics atCase Western Reserve University; and Anil Jain, senior executive IT director atthe Cleveland Clinic while the study was being conducted, and now CMIO atCleveland Clinic spin-off Explorys – about the gap in care quality between patientsattending practices using EHRs and those still in the paper- and filing-cabinetera, the competitive nature of providers sharing patient data, and bridging thechasm between EHRs and PHRs.
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http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/mayo-study-shows-value-social-media-clinical-research/2011-08-30
Mayo: Social media useful to recruit patients for clinicalresearch
August 30, 2011 — 4:09pm ET | By Ken Terry
The use of social media and online networking promises to beimportant both in clinical trial recruitment and in clinical discovery. Downthe line, it might even prove valuable in comparative effectiveness research.
A new Mayo Clinic study shows that social media can help researchersfind patients with rare diseases who are candidates for clinical trials morequickly than conventional methods of recruitment.
Using patient-run websites dedicated to heart conditions and women'sheart health, a team of cardiologists led by Sharonne Hayes, MD, is reachingout to survivors of spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), a conditionthat affects only a few thousand people a year, but can be fatal if it leads toa heart attack.
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Cloud-based service streamlines quicker image sharing forhospital
September 1, 2011 —7:48pm ET | By Ken Terry
Montefiore MedicalCenter in the Bronx, N.Y., has begun using a cloud-based service to sharemedical images among multiple physicians without entering them into thehealthcare system's picture archiving and communication system (PACS),according to an article in InformationWeek.
These are imagesthat the Montefiore specialists use in their review of referrals before theyaccept patients for treatment. The images, which may arrive on disc or film,have not been entered into the PACS. In case more than one physician has toview the images, the other doctors can pull them down from the cloud ratherthan waiting for the physical media to be delivered.
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Verizon health ID management expands to cover EHRs, HIEs
September 1, 2011 —5:54pm ET | By Ken Terry
Verizon isexpanding its cloud-based identity-management services for healthcareproviders. Verizon Universal Identify Services-Healthcare, founded in November2010, now supports new identity standards for accessing electronic healthrecords and health information exchanges. In addition, it offers new featuresfor electronic prescribing, including the prescribing of controlled substances.
Verizon nowprovides legally binding digital signature capabilities for authenticatingsignatures on clinical documents. The company's new ID Message Center allowsusers to monitor their digital signature activities through a mobileapplication or optional Web-based portal. Providers can use their smartphonesor other mobile devices to gain access to Verizon's identity managementfeatures.
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Why Halamka's health IT predictions might overestimate thefuture
September 5, 2011 —4:46pm ET | By Ken Terry
John Halamka, CIOof Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a professor of medicineat Harvard Medical School, is one of the most respected opinion leaders inhealth IT. He's also one of the smartest people I know. Yet his new piece inthe MIT TechnologyReview, predicting where health IT will take usin the next five years, is too optimistic by half.
I don't disputeHalamka's contention that the pace of electronic health record adoption willaccelerate dramatically, partly because of the federal government's incentiveprogram. Nor do I disagree with his argument that health IT will be essentialto transforming the provider payment system in ways that can control costgrowth.
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EMIS: 'lessons learned' from crash
1 September2011 Fiona Barr
The outage at theEMIS data centre was “a very rare occurrence” caused by a number of complex,interacting factors that are unlikely to be repeated, the company has said.
In a statementissued first to EHI Primary Care, Sean Riddell, the chief executive of EMIS,said the investigation into theoutage on 18 August - which affected almost 800 GP practices -has now been concluded.
He added: “Thisshows that the outage was the result of a number of complex, interactingfactors- it was, in effect, a very rare occurrence that could not have beenpredicted.
“At its core was aseries of multiple, consecutive component failures in one of our storagedevices – combined with a previously unknown bug in the hard disk firmware –that culminated in an unexpected shutdown of the entire device.”
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Tech That Powers Quality Standards
GiennaShaw, for HealthLeaders Media , September 6, 2011
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine isamong the first to put hard numbers on the benefits of electronic healthrecords.
Researchers looked at fournational quality standards, including:
- eye exams,
- pneumonia vaccinations,
- outcome measures such as blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol control,
- patient-driven issues such as obesity and smoking
Nearly 51% of patients in EHR practices received care that met allfour quality standards, compared to just 7% of patients at paper-basedpractices. Nearly 44% of patients in EHR practices met at least four of fiveoutcome standards, compared to about 16% of patients at paper-based practices.
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Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Jury Still Out on Health IT Workforce Training Programs
With health careproviders working to implement electronic health records to qualify formeaningful use incentive payments and vendors seeing big spikes in business, itis not surprising that there is a huge demand for health IT professionals. Whatis surprising, though, are reports from recent graduates of federal health ITtraining programs who say they can't find a job.
It's been estimatedthat the country will need up to 50,000 health IT professionals to help doctorsand hospitals meet meaningful use criteria.
With the U.S.unemployment rate hovering around 9%, health IT is seen as an area ripe for jobcreation. The federal government has invested millions of dollars in developinga skilled health IT workforce, and interest in federal health IT trainingprograms has been high.
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Tuesday, September 6, 2011
A Federal Jump-start for Health IT
WhiteHouse aide leads push to improve health-care IT with billions in stimulusfunds.
In a landmarkgovernment effort to drive American health care into the information age, theFebruary 2009 stimulus bill earmarked about $30 billion in incentives fordoctors and hospitals who install electronic medical records—paying up to$63,750 to individual physician and millions to hospitals.
Now comes the toughpart: implementing "EMRs" and proving they really can reduce medicalerrors or get doctors to keep better track of chronically ill people. AsNational Coordinator for Health IT, Farzad Mostashari coordinates federalefforts to promote adoption of EMRs and to prod reluctant hospitals to sharepatient data.
Mostashari wasrecruited to take over the federal effort in February, after leading apatient-records initiative as an assistant health commissioner in New YorkCity. He spoke with TechnologyReview's chief correspondent, David Talbot, about when we'll startseeing evidence that the technology is working.
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Mobile staff 'save £3k each per year'
1 September2011 Fiona Barr
Mobile workingby community staff could save £3,000 per clinician per year, theDepartment of Health’s National Mobile Health Worker project has concluded.
A 254-page reportsays clinicians working across the 11 sitesin the project estimated that mobile devices loaded with office and clinicalsoftware allowed them to make nearly 9% fewer referrals and avoid 21% ofadmissions.
Using standardisedcosts developed by Kent University, the project estimated this would equate toa saving of £3,002 per clinician per year.
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- Fri Sep 02 2011
eHealth fiasco has a deep and wasteful history
The provincialelection is about to begin, but the campaign against eHealth Ontario is alreadytwo years old — and still going strong.
EHealth is the giftthat keeps on giving, the kiss of death in a field that is supposed to savelives. Brace yourself, in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 6 vote, for yet morereruns of the “billion-dollar-boondoggle” attack line.
Toronto Mayor RobFord used that catchphrase to devastating effect against his opponent in thecity’s mayoral election — former provincial health minister George Smitherman,who carried much of the baggage for the eHealth fiasco. But like that otherFord slogan — “ending the gravy train at city hall” — the billion-dollar-boondoggleallegation doesn’t quite add up.
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Enjoy!
David.
