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Delivering Quality Health IT Industry & Government News, Insights and Trends that are Physician Focused and Patient Driven®!
In this month’s newsletter, our topics include:
Four Key Steps When Evaluating Encryption For PHI Data Security
Encryption is an important breach prevention tool. But to make the right decisions about how to apply encryption, healthcare organizations should take four key steps
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Unsecured Email Transmisions Result In PHI Data Breach
The Regional Medical Center in Memphis is notifying patients of a HIPAA breach after an employee sent out three unsecure emails containing the protected health information and Social Security numbers of nearly 1,200 patients.
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Best Practices For Preparing For A Meaningful Use Audit
ONC/CMS provides strong oversight of the meaningful use program by continuousy reexamining the quality of certified products and auditing hospitals and practices that have attested to meaningful use.
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Best Practices On Avoiding Large OCR HIPAA Fines
What determines the size of a penalty for HIPAA violations? The key factors are the lack of a timely risk assessment and the failure to address ongoing security issues, says Leon Rodriguez, director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights.
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Building Patient Trust Is Vital To Health Information Exchanges
In recent weeks, federal regulators and their advisers have been deliberating about how best to earn patient trust that their privacy will be protected as their data is shared among providers via evolving health information exchanges.
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CHIME Calls For 1 Year Delay Of Stage 2 Meaningful Use
Responding to a feedback request from Senators on Capitol Hill regarding health IT adoption, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executivescalled for a one-year pushback of the Stage 2 meaningful use deadline and defended the efficacy of the federal incentive program.
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How Voice Recognition May Improve Patient Engagement
Try trotting this one out at a party: there are now more cell phones than there are toilets in the world. That’s according to a recent UN study, and while the study is actually focused on what the UN deems a global sanitation crisis, to many healthcare stakeholders the number of people with access to cellphones – around 6 billion, the study estimates – constitutes a major opportunity to increase access to healthcare.
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Deloitte Study Finds Health IT Underutilized By Physicians
The majority of physicians nationwide believe health information technology can precipitate positive outcomes in the provider setting, but in many realms — such as mHealth — health IT continues to be underutilized by docs, according to the findings of a new Deloitte study.
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Monthly HHS & CMS Update:
CMS Reports EHR Incentive Payments Surpass $13B
Continuing the upward trajectory of EHR reimbursements flowing out into the healthcare industry, CMS said on Tuesday morning that the total paid as of March’s end is more than $13.7 billion.
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HHS To Address HIPAA Rules For Firearm Background Checks
After last year’s mass shootings in Colorado and Connecticut, the Obama Administration has been looking for ways to address gun violence, either through new legal reforms or by working with existing policy, and one option is to clarify HIPAA provisions that may be preventing the reporting of mental health information to the national background check system.
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HHS Unveils New Tools To Educate Healthcare Providers About The HIPAA Privacy And Security Rules
The Department of Health and Human Services, in its auditing and enforcement activities, has confirmed that a lack of training is a common cause of HIPAA compliance difficulties. So it’s taking several steps to help.
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CMS Provides Details On Meaningful Use Audits
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services this year implemented pre-payment audits on Medicare and dually eligible (Medicare and Medicaid) providers participating in the EHR Incentive Programs. The pre-payment audits complement post-payment audits that CMS has conducted since 2012.
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ONC Releases Governance Framework For Electronic Health Information Exchange
Last year, ONC issued a Request for Information (RFI) to gather public input on a potential regulatory approach that would have spelled out “conditions for trusted exchange” (safeguards, technical, and business practice) through rulemaking, and establish a voluntary accreditation and certification process for validating organizations as being legitimate participants in the Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN).
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CMS Publishes Hospital Charge Data
In an effort to take the first steps toward a more transparent pricing structure in the U.S. healthcare market, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services yesterday published nationwide hospital charge data showing wide variations in how much Medicare pays for services in different markets.
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