Weekly roundup: Breach, interoperability & quality measures

In this week’s news, yet another data breach continues the trend but, on the plus side, small steps toward greater interoperability and acceptance of quality measures were taken.

The theft of a hospital laptop containing registration records of 27,000 patients is the source of data breach in Tennessee. The laptop was reported stolen from an employee’s home and has not yet been recovered. According to information posted on the hospital’s website, the laptop was password-protected and contained no medical information, but did contain some patient and responsible party non-medical information.

The latest news includes small steps toward greater interoperability. For example, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) intends to survey a sample of clinical laboratories nationwide to develop a more complete understanding of existing laboratory exchange capabilities.

“The national survey on health information exchange in clinical laboratories will assess and evaluate the transfer of health information from clinical laboratories to ordering physicians,” according to the information collection request submitted by the ONC to the Office of Management and Budget.

Several developments related to quality measures made the news this week as well. For one, a study found that the addition of written-prescription data to measures of adherence identified nearly twice as many nonadherent patients and markedly improved prediction of changes in low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol.

Meanwhile, the National Quality Forum endorsed six new quality measures and reaffirmed its support for 10 existing quality measures related to the diagnosis and treatment of breast and colon cancers.

On the other hand, broadly defined clinical quality measures could fail to accurately capture the true volume and quality of care provided, according to research published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.

Many measures are “designed for querying health insurance data claims,” wrote the lead author. “Claims data, however, do not include the uninsured and may miss care that is delivered but not submitted for billing to the insurance plan. In addition, although many of the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 ( CHIPRA) measures specify strict timelines for receipt of preventive serves, there is a general lack of evidence for much of this specificity.”

To determine the volume and quality of care captured by more broadly defined measures, researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study using EHRs from a clinic with a five-year-old system.

Expanding the definition of measures improved the rates at which they were met. For instance, the clinic met a CHIPRA measure requiring at least six well-child visits within 15 months from birth 52.4 percent of the time, but would have met the measure 60.8 percent of the time if that deadline were extended to two years. Also, a measure of immunizations provided was met 65 percent of the time according to the way it’s written, but met 70 percent of the time when parental objections were taken into account.  

Advances and setbacks this week. Perhaps you are experiencing the same at your facility? Please share your experience.

Beth Walsh, Editor

bwalsh@trimedmedia.com