The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) recently announced the release of new guidance for healthcare providers wishing to assess their level of preparedness for cybersecurity threats. This guidance incorporates a specific subset of controls within the HITRUST Community Security Framework (CSF) that relate to cybersecurity.

More than 650 clients of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services are impacted by a stolen laptop.

Yet another stolen laptop is the source of a breach impacting 13,600 patients of United HomeCare in Miami.

NANUET, N.Y., April 11, 2013 -- iMedicor (OTC: VMCI) today announced that it had been chosen by iHealthTrust, a Houston-based Federally funded Health Information Exchange (HIE) serving a market of some 12,000 physicians and hospitals in the Houston and Gulf coast regions, to provide them with secure communications services via the iMedicor SocialHIE platform.iMedicor's marketing partner, Galaxy Health Network, a managed care provider organization comprising 400,000 physicians, 2,700 medical centers and 47,000 ancillary care facilities nationwide, will support the iMedicor program via outreach services to Galaxy members in the Houston/Gulf Coast region.

BOSTON--Beware of the perils of data warehouses, Jon D’Amore, MS, founder of Clinfometrics, advised an audience at the Medical Informatics World Conference on April 8.Providers are still a long way off from meeting Stage 2 Meaningful Use (MU) that requires the achievement of advanced clinical processes and better population health management through EHR information capture and exchange, said co-speaker Dean Sittig, PhD, professor at the school of biomedical informatics at the University of Texas Health Center.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published guidance on Meaningful Use audits being conducted by its contractor, Figliozzi and Company. States also are conducting their own audits for the Medicaid EHR incentive program.

From exchange of behavioral data to states linking their exchange to grants designed to accelerate information exchange, health information exchange (HIE) has had another busy month.

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center has notified approximately 700 patients of a breach after a processing error sent patient billing statements to other patients' addresses.