MEDHOST Launches Order Management Solution
Committed to giving physicians technology that fits their existing processes and is easy to use, the MEDHOST Physician Experience has been enhanced with the launch of a unique Order Management solution. The new application streamlines the chart, note and order functionality with a contemporary and intuitive user interface that is designed to drive rapid physician adoption.
Physician Order Management is part of the continuous MEDHOST Physician Experience. This one-of-a-kind clinical suite is designed with the objective to provide improved experience in natural workflow for physicians, enhance patient care and safety, create more efficient enterprise-wide processes and improve financial performance, while allowing meaningful use requirements to be met.
Core elements include:
Chart: Fully integrated into physician experience with note and order management, the patient chart streamlines the display of information. Chart uses diagrams like the fishbone display so clinicians can quickly review, enter and update clinical data.
Note: The cornerstone and original physician experience component, note empowers clinicians to enter the context of a patient’s record and to view a list of all notes for the patient’s current and any previous encounter.
Order: Enhanced order management’s intuitive workspace allows physicians to easily modify, suspend, discontinue or reorder existing orders or select new orders, including order sets, which they can customize for the needs of the individual patients. Physicians can select the relevant orders as well as modify the orders in real time based on the patient’s status.
Healthspek Expands Service with Insurance Finder
The developers of Nashville-based personal health management platform Healthspek recently announced the addition of Insurance Finder, a free service to aid consumers in researching and finding trusted health and life insurance agents by location.
As an award-winning platform for individuals and families to track, collect and safely disseminate personal healthcare information, Healthspek utilizes healthcare technology to improve patient experience. Dozens of “speks” allow users to own and manage a variety of relevant healthcare needs from vitals and charts to resources on medical conditions and medication reminders. The platform also serves as a repository for legal documents, and now Insurance Finder is now available to all Healthspek account holders on the user-configurable dashboard.
“The dashboard is like a virtual services mall that allows you to consolidate all of your healthcare information and access relevant services in one place. We’re constantly thinking of ways to grow the dashboard, and Insurance Finder is one result of that,” said Randy Farr, co-founder and CEO of Healthspek.
Once in Insurance Finder, the new feature pinpoints a user’s location and pulls up the profiles and contact information of recommended health and life insurance agents in that area. Users can also run searches by zip code to find trusted agents recommended by Healthspek across the nation.
Clearwater Compliance Webinars
Hendersonville-based Clearwater Compliance has several upcoming webinars geared toward HIPAA-HITECH compliance. Webinars run from 11 am-noon CDT unless otherwise noted.
Friday, May 15: The Critical Difference: HIPAA Security Evaluation vs. HIPAA Security Risk Analysis
Friday, May 22: Bona Fide HIPAA Security Risk Analysis and Risk Management
Thursday, May 28: Blue Ribbon Panel: Information Risk Management Essentials (11 am-12:30 pm)
Thursday, June 4: How to Calculate the Cost of a Data Breach & How to Get the Budget for Your HIPAA-HITECH Compliance Program (11 am-12:15 pm)
Thursday, June 11: How to Develop Your HIPAA-HITECH Policies & Procedures
Thursday, June 18: How to Conduct a HIPAA Security Compliance Self Audit
For more information or to register, go online to clearwatercompliance.com and click on the Education tab.
Meaningful Use Proposed Rule Offers Relief
Last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a 210-page draft rule regarding an easing of some elements of Meaningful Use criteria to satisfy requirements of the EHR program.
“The shortened reporting period that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services proposes gives hospitals more time to transition to Stage 2 and increases the likelihood they will meet CMS’s timetable. However, the inclusion of numerous additional program changes at this late date risks causing confusion and added burden for hospitals on top of the elements proposed in the Stage 3 rule,” said Linda Fishman, senior vice president of Public Policy Analysis and Development for the American Hospital Association.
The 60-day comment period ends in June, and a final rule is anticipated this summer.
HBMA, AHIMA Establish Partnership
At the end of March, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and the Healthcare Billing and Management Association (HBMA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding that will allow the associations to collaborate and share educational benefits with their members.
The agreement increases the amount of resources available to members of each association and provides opportunities for collaboration on best practices and procedures to ensure the quality of health information. As part of the agreement, AHIMA and HBMA will accept continuing education units (CEUs) for prior approval from each organization and provide webinars to each others’ members for free. With similar industry perspectives, the partnership provides an opportunity for AHIMA and HBMA to lead the information management and healthcare billing professions as advances in healthcare technology grow.
Game Theory Reveals New Ways to Protect De-Identified Healthcare Data
A new study from Vanderbilt introduces an adroit and flexible strategy to quash attacks on patient privacy and aid the flow of vital research data. The study, which appeared recently in PLOS ONE, treats publishers and recipients of de-identified patient data as potential competitors whose prospective benefits, gains and losses can be estimated in dollars.
Patient records represent rich fuel for the advancement of science and medicine, and obliging hospitals, healthcare payers and electronic medical record companies churn out patient records in de-identified form. However, surreptitiously re-identified records could be used to discriminate against or otherwise prey upon patients. The most likely type of attacker would attempt to link public records to de-identified records, seeking as many unique (or close to unique) matches as possible.
Using mathematical models in the form of game theory, and a laptop computer, doctoral candidate Zhiyu Wan, Bradley Malin, PhD, Yevgeney Vorobeychik, PhD, and co-authors showed it’s possible to smash a would-be privacy attacker’s expectations to zero while sharing much more research data than is typically shared today. What’s more, the paper’s embedded case study of genomic data sharing suggests that currently favored patient de-identification practices are likely to leave privacy attack risks on the table. The authors’ re-identification game, as it’s called, could be wielded by publishers to remove this risk.
Consideration of real-world incentives has apparently been largely absent from theoretical work on patient de-identification. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to apply game theory to potential data-oriented attacks on patient privacy. “Some people will find this off-putting. It may be difficult to convince a regulator that balancing the need to protect privacy with sharing data for research purposes should be treated as if it’s a game,” said Malin, associate professor of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science and director of the Health Information Privacy Laboratory.
The problem that haunts de-identification is that to strip out or partially obscure so-called quasi-identifiers — age, race, zip codes, etc. — is to significantly degrade a record’s scientific and public health utility.
There’s a simple recipe publishers can follow that indiscriminately suppresses all sorts of quasi-identifiers, and because it has the virtue of conferring safe harbor from federal penalties, it’s popular. Publishers are free to devise more discriminating strategies, but they understandably tend to prefer safe harbor.
The re-identification game lets publishers at once optimize the value of a de-identified data set and forestall attacks from rational adversaries. The game can accommodate different incentives leading to vastly different payoff levels. To demonstrate the game, the authors use grant dollars and fines to measure benefits, gains and losses.
In the no-risk version of the game, the publisher zeroes-out the attacker’s incentive as data is released in the game’s opening move.
As Vorobeychik notes, this is a somewhat artificial variant of the basic game, which has the publisher instead putting slight amounts of risk in play in order to optimize the value of the published data. “But with the no-risk version there’s no downside and you can still share more data” than safe harbor, said Vorobeychik, assistant professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering.
As currently set out, the game applies to structured data only — that is, numerical or categorical data typically arrayed in rows and columns. The policy discussion would appear to be stuck in limbo. Enterprising journalists and academics, Malin among them, have found vulnerabilities in patient de-identification methods. but there have been no reports of anyone ever attacking these data with intention to harm.
Could the re-identification game enliven the policy discussion, help bring it down to earth? “If we can do something to influence the way people think about data sharing and privacy, I think that would be a good contribution to the work,” Malin said.
RELATED LINK:
MEDHOST: www.medhost.com
Healthspek: www.healthspek.com
Clearwater Compliance: www.clearwatercompliance.com
AHIMA: hwww.ahima.org
HBMA: www.hbma.org/index.php
CMS Modifications to Meaningful Use 2015-2017: https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2015-08514.pdf