More concerns, more breaches
This week saw data breaches, new reports on telehealth and the ongoing saga of Karen DeSalvo’s role as head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.
After informing stakeholders that her role as acting assistant secretary for health to help coordinate the federal response to the Ebola outbreak did not, in fact, mean she was leaving the ONC, organizations said handling health IT for the country is not a part-time job.
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society wrote a letter about the situation saying they welcomed DeSalvo splitting up her responsibilities—but only if it is intended to be temporary and that she would eventually resume her role as the full-time leader of ONC.
“A full-time national coordinator must be in place in time for ONC’s review of all comments received from the public on the Interoperability Roadmap v1.0,” according to the letter. “If DeSalvo is going to remain as the acting assistant secretary for health with part-time duties in health IT, we emphasize the need to appoint new ONC leadership immediately that can lead the agency on the host of critical issues that must be addressed.”
Meanwhile, hackers were able to access a state insurance plan subcontractor's computer system for three months, putting thousands of plan members' records at risk.
Even after discovering the breach in April, plan officials did not notify the 60,582 individuals affected for another four months.
Dallas-based Onsite Health Diagnostics (OHD), a medical testing and screening company, contracts with the state of Tennessee's wellness plan. The company notified those affected that their protected health information was accessed and stored by an "unknown source." The breach affected members from the Tennessee's State Insurance Plan, Local Government Insurance Plan and Local Education Insurance plan.
The company said the system accessed hadn't been in official use since fall 2013. Health benefit member names, dates of birth, addresses, emails, phone numbers and gender were compromised in the incident.
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.