For years – since HIPAA privacy rules were finalized actually – I’ve had my nemesis. I’ve never met her. Never heard her speak in a public forum. But everything I have read about that included a quote from her about the state of healthcare privacy laws in this country has led me to believe she [...]

With the excitement of Navin R. Johnson (Steve Martin) in the 1979 film “The Jerk” I was thrilled to see the government release the definition of meaningful use at the end of 2009. The nearly 600 page document was as big as the phonebook that contained Navin R. Johnson’s new listing and made him “somebody” [...]

As the use of the internet increasingly becomes a community blackboard, how does that affect the risk of privacy violations for provider’s patients? What are implications when a hospital employee has their picture taken with a patient and posts it on their Facebook? People are talking about patients they cared for on a [...]

http://www.mgma.com/WorkArea/mgma_downloadasset.aspx?id=31758 http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/meaningful_use-39399-1.html http://www.inteck-inc.com/leadershipteam.htm#JK http://www.inteck-inc.com/services.htm

Our government continues to march toward more modifying how HIPAA addresses the electronic transactions by which payors and providers conduct financial business. On November 7, 2009 the house passed a bill that should help make the transaction sets more uniform.
The key word – uniform! Isn’t that what the original intent of the transactions and [...]

Just in time for Halloween, the Department of Health and Human Services released an interim rule that helps HIPAA grow some fangs for enforcing violations. While the privacy advocates continue to say HIPAA doesn’t go far enough, at least this is a step in the right direction.
Georgina Verdugo, director of the HHS Office for [...]

Nearly 20 percent of Medicaid managed care plan provider CalOptima members learned this week that personal health information, including demographic and medical procedure codes, has gone missing. The copies of the information were stored on an unidentified type of electronic media and sent via the United States Postal Service by a claims scanning vendor. According [...]

KLAS released a new report on July 13, 2009. They confirmed what I’ve seen firsthand – rural community hospitals under 100 beds want information technology but can’t find the right vendor. My question to the hospitals is are they doing the right things to match their needs to a vendor?
Selecting a core healthcare information system [...]

Ever since HITECH section of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) become a topic of conversation, there has been speculation as to what role Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) would play. I said it then, and recent moves by both standards groups only reinforces [...]

Implementing an electronic medical record (EMR) system is the easy part. In order to bring value to the healthcare organization, it is important to adhere to the “meaningful use” doctrine set forth by the Obama Administration. An extra incentive to adhere to meaningful use of an EMR system is that healthcare organizations will receive monetary [...]