EHR debate, colossal breach

Bad news dominated the headlines this week. From both a massive breach and smaller breaches to wild claims about the failure of a $1 billion EHR system, the industry had an off week.

The California Nurses Association released numerous disturbing claims, including Sutter Health's EHR system is negatively impacting patient care and safety, managers are threatening nurses and downtime is excessive while the health system says that downtime is an expected part of a big implementation and the association is exploiting the situation is the wake of labor negotiations. It should be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Meanwhile, several breaches were in the news this week including one with the potential to impact 4 million patients. An office burglary at Advocate Medical Group (AMG) in Park Ridge, Ill., resulted in the theft of four password-protected but unencrypted computers.

The computers contained limited clinical information, according to the organization, but included names, addresses, dates of birth and Social Security numbers.

On the upside, Florida legislators are pushing for increases in the use of and payment for telemedicine. Two bills would require Medicaid and private insurers to reimburse for telemedicine and prevent insurers from requiring face-to-face visits between doctors and patients. And, Emdeon unveiled its self-service ICD-10 testing exchange which allows providers to submit ICD-10 test claims on Emdeon’s self-service customer service portal and receive claim status feedback.

Have all the breaches in the news had any impact on your organization's privacy and security efforts? Please share your experience.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor