The Nebraska Health Information Initiative, Kansas Health Information Network and Missouri Health Connection are now connected and able to exchange Direct secure messages across state lines.

The wait for the omnibus privacy rule “was extraordinary,” considering there was no good reason for the delay, Lisa J. Sotto, managing partner of the New York City office of Hunton & Williams law firm, told Clinical Innovation + Technology in an interview. But, “it is definitely time to move to the next generation with respect to HIPAA.” When HIPAA was enacted in 1996, “we were in the dark ages of data privacy and security so a refocus is a good thing.”

Months after launching a website devoted to consumer feedback on privacy and security for mobile apps, Congressman Hank Johnson (Ga.-D) has released the discussion draft of the APPS Act, a bill to increase consumer privacy on mobile devices.

Rex Hospital, a member of University of North Carolina (UNC) Health Care in North Carolina, has implemented Merge Hemo from Merge Healthcare to automate their cath lab processes into their electronic patient record.

An unencrypted, password-protected laptop stolen from the hotel room of a Washington University professor traveling in Argentina contained information on 1,100 patients, including names, dates of birth, diagnoses and Social Security numbers.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released the final omnibus rule designed to strengthen the privacy and security protections for health information established under HIPAA. The rule enhances patients' privacy protections, provides individuals new rights to their health information and strengthens the government’s ability to enforce the law.

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.

Family physicians are adopting EHRs faster than previous data suggested, reaching a nearly 70 percent adoption rate nationwide, according to findings published in Annals of Family Medicine. EHR adoption by family physicians has doubled since 2005, with researchers estimating that the adoption rate will exceed 80 percent by the end of 2013.