Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh and Denmark’s health minister Astrid Krag, highlighted mobile healthcare as the way to improve outcomes in the future at the mHealth Summit. Yunus, the Grameen Movement pioneer, who opened up his native Bangladesh to the power of cellphones, said that smartphone has the power to transform people’s Read more…
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Security blunder sees PHI leaked online
Protected Health Information (PHI) of 33,000 individuals was inadvertently leaked online, on the search engine Google, due to a security flaw. Patients of Cottage Health System in Santa Barbara, California were informed by the three-hospital system that their information could have been available online for nearly two months. The lapse occurred after one of their Read more…
The Blue Button brouhaha
When President Obama launched the Blue Button initiative for veterans in 2010, the idea was to make a consumer engagement tool that empowers the patients by enabling them to access and download their online medical records. Today, the use of and the awareness about this initiative has skyrocketed and it has become an important part Read more…
Key 2014 deadlines for physicians
The new year is going to be important for physicians in meeting regulatory requirements and reporting deadlines. These deadlines will affect quality of care, adoption and usage of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). These deadlines relate to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and more importantly, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). January 1, 2014: CMS Meaningful Use Read more…
Healthcare IT Risk Assessment: 5 Steps
Healthcare IT systems are intertwined with operations, policies and processes along with a bunch of systems, application and data. Sometimes the systems are so complex that one breakdown can last for days and cost the organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost time and money. Therefore, it is imperative that healthcare organizations dependent on Read more…
Improving patient engagement through patient portals
Patient portals are one of the major requirements for Meaningful Use Stage 2 and beyond, and they are in big demand. From large scale practices to small and medium ones, everyone is using these portals to improve patient engagement and shared decision making. Even the physicians who are not offering patient portals are looking to offer Read more…
CMS extends deadlines for Meaningful Use Stage 2 and 3
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has extended the provider attestation deadlines for Meaningful Use Stage 2 and stage 3. Under the new timeline, Stage 2 will now be extended until 2016 while. Stage 3 will begin in 2017 for providers who would complete two years in Stage 2. According to Rob Tagalicod, Read more…
Meaningful Use benefits driving EHR adoption
In 2009, when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was promulgated, the need of the hour was to put the ailing US economy back on the path to recovery. The purpose of The Recovery Act was to immediately create and save jobs, and to provide temporary relief to the sectors most impacted by the Read more…
Security risks for the healthcare industry in 2014
With the emerging technological trends and with new devices coming out each year, the security risks for the healthcare industry are huge. Cyber-crimes keep on getting more sophisticated. Should the private practice be concerned about it? Let’s find out some of the risks that will affect the healthcare industry in 2014. Social networks: Facebook, Twitter and Read more…
Data center outages costing healthcare industry big time
Without a shadow of doubt, technology has made our lives simpler in a way that we could not have imagined about two decades back. If someone back then had spoken of how we would be able to carry our emails with us all the time through smartphones, browse the entire world with just a few Read more…