Small steps toward the bigger picture

Healthcare reform. Healthcare overhaul. Healthcare lite. As Congress and the Oval Office grit their teeth and look for consensus or attempt to thwart it, federal agencies and others are quietly making progress toward meaningful changes in the way health IT gets done. These behind-the-scenes efforts are small steps toward adapting healthcare for the future and possibly lowering the cost of care.

First, to standards efforts: During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule (IFR) of meaningful use. A single implementation guide was proposed regarding the NCPDP SCRIPT, a standard for e-prescribing, HL7 version 2, the standard for the exchange, integration and retrieval of EHRs, and HL7 Clinical Document Architecture, the standard for the specification of the encoding and structuring of clinical documents.

On the patient data security front, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the Office of Civil Rights Web site has posted a list of entities that reported health information data breaches affecting more than 500 people. The HITECH  Act requires HHS to post the list, which includes the entity’s name, the nature of the breach and the number of individuals affected. The list includes 36 breaches dating from Sept. 22, 2009--when entities were first required to start reporting the breaches--to one that occurred last month. The biggest breach affected half a million people. Most of the cases involved the loss or theft of stolen devices such as laptops and most of the cases affected less than 10,000. Eleven of the breaches impacted fewer than 1,000 persons.

Proactive measures such as data encryption, strong password management and hardware locks will help combat patient identity theft, but breach notification, although reactive by nature, allows affected healthcare systems and individuals to limit potential damage. 

A final thought from one of our Web Exclusives: “We know that IT and the communities and communication it helps to create are going in the right direction, but we're uncertain how far IT will take us because we don’t have enough experience,” said independent healthcare consultant Stephen Jencks. He made the remark during a Webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). However, you could apply the comment to plenty of other areas in the healthcare spectrum.

You can find out more about the state of the state in health IT and communication by tuning in to CMIO's coverage of the HIMMS show in Atlanta next week. To get our daily updates of education sessions from HIMSS, be sure you’re signed up for CMIO News at CMIO.net. 

--Mary Stevens, Editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com 

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