Weekly roundup: Advances and setbacks

2013 continues to offer developments that will have a big impact on the healthcare industry. The Department of Health and Human Services just issued its long-awaited update to the HIPAA privacy and security rules and we will bring you details and analysis on that next week. This week, however, the comment period for the proposed rule of Meaningful Use Stage 3 came to an end.

The American College of Physicians (ACP), the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and other organizations submitted their comments with a primary message of “slow down!” Rather than create more measures, the community needs to focus more on measuring improvements in patient outcomes, says the ACP. CHIME urged the federal advisory committee to recommend thorough evaluations of what has been accomplished thus far in order to establish realistic measures and objectives for Stage 3. 

Meanwhile, Walmart has committed $670,000 to underwrite the Arkansas Payment Improvement Initiative, a statewide effort to transform healthcare delivery with the hopes of containing costs and improving quality. It should be interesting to see how this role of the largest private employer in the U.S. plays out and impacts other employers.

Numerous futuristic health apps for mobile phones are now available but a new study indicates that not all of those apps are as revolutionary as initially thought. The diagnostic performance of smartphone applications designed to assess melanoma risk is generally poor and highly variable, according to a study published in JAMA Dermatology.

The researchers measured the performance of smartphone apps that evaluate photographs of skin lesions and provide feedback to individuals. They focused on four apps and found that sensitivity ranged from 6.8 percent to 98.1 percent; specificity from 30.4 percent to 93.7 percent; positive predictive value from 33.3 percent to 42.1 percent and negative predictive value from 65.4 percent to 97 percent.

Looking forward, the 2013 Clinical Innovation + Technology Health IT Leadership Survey is live. We want to know what you think about some of the most challenging IT issues facing the healthcare industry, including ICD-10, Meaningful Use and privacy and security. We’ll present the results in March so participate now.

Beth Walsh

Editor, Clinical Innovation + Technology