South Shore Hospital in Boston has agreed to pay $750,000 to resolve allegations because the provider failed to protect the personal and confidential health information of more than 800,000 consumers, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley announced. The investigation and settlement resulted from a data breach reported to the AGs office in July 2010 that included individuals names, Social Security numbers, financial account numbers and medical diagnoses.

Which EHR documentation style best suits the quality of care a physician performs? Research published online May 19 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association suggested dictated EHR documentation appears to fare worse than structured and free text documentation.

Actuarial firm Milliman has released an accountable care organization (ACO) cheat sheet to guide stakeholders through the ins and outs of Medicare Shared Savings Program and the Pioneer ACOs.

The staff at Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) likely dont have easy days at the office. With notices of proposed rulemaking being drafted with great speed relative to traditionally thought-of government timelines, the onslaught of opinions from the public to reconcile should come as no surprise. Last week, the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) and Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) offered slightly differing opinions on the ICD-10 implementation process.

To properly evaluate and compare results that will aid in the implementation of the patient centered medical home (PCMH) effort and other initiatives, the Commonwealth Fund recommended a standard set of core measures in a data brief released this month.

Medication adherence may not be a useful performance measure, based on results of a study that assessed the association between medication adherence and blood pressure control at the clinic level. Treatment intensification may be a suitable metric for gauging quality, but the authors cautioned that it may prove difficult for some providers to capture the data accurately and may have unintended adverse consequences in some hypertensive patients.

A new study confirms the suspicion that infections contracted in hospitals correlate strongly with readmissions, prompting the authors to recommend that patients discharged with positive clinical cultures receive additional planning resources before heading home.

The inception of national incident reporting systems in other medical specialties and high-risk industries has produced demonstrable improvements in safety, and radiology could realize similar benefits if the profession implemented such a system. However, medical imaging lags behind in adoption of a national system, according the authors of an article published in the May issue of Journal of American College of Radiology.