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ONC Seeking New Authority Due to Increase in EHR Usage
The rate at which Electronic Health Records were adopted has increased the demand on ONC to the point of requesting new health data blocking powers. At least that is the case made by ONC chief Karen DeSalvo. In testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform committee’s subcommittee on IT hearing last week. Answering a question from Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA-) about gaps in information sharing, "You are touching on the challenge that has emerged since we have been adopting electronic health records and moving to a digitized system — that is, that state laws vary and there is some need to harmonize that.” Dr. DeSalvo emphasized the point that data blocking is a new phenomenon that was unforeseen at the passage of HITECH in 2009. “… the world has evolved there is a new need for us to have some additional opportunities to protect the people who are using systems…”
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Pushback from Telemedicine on new DC Regulation
The American Telemedicine Association has declared that the new District of Columbia telemedicine rules are “onerous and arbitrary”. In a statement sent to the DC Department of Health on Friday the ATA believes that regulations should be very clear when allowing clinicians to exercise medical judgement on how to treat a patient on the initial encounter. In the statement, ATA goes into specific suggestions regarding e-mail communications, informed consent, and establishment of care.
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eHI WELCOMES NEW MEMBER, Baptist Health! Baptist Health is a provider network with over 200 sites of care spanning Kentucky and surrounding states.
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UPCOMING EVENTS:
Wednesday, April 13, 3-4 pm Policy Steering Committee
Tuesday, April 19, 2-3 pm Policy Working Group
Wednesday, April 20, 2-3 pm Business and Clinical
Motivators workgroup
2016 Innovation Challenge: October 4-5
To be included in any of the upcoming events email claudia.ellison@ehidc.org.
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EHR Vendors Testing FHIR Apps for PMI Data Collection
The National Institutes of Health, in coordination with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, announced a pilot program in a blog post as a component of the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative. The pilot, called Sync for Science (S4S), enables individuals participating in a national research cohort of one million to access their healthcare data and share it with program researchers. Six Electronic Health Records vendors; Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, drchrono, Epic and McKesson, plan to pilot the use of open and standardized applications across platforms to give individuals the option to securely contribute their data to research. S4S leverages HL7’s emerging Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard to foster interoperability.
Push for Pain-tracking Database System to curb Opioid Abuse
In light of the nation’s current opioid addiction crisis, there is urgent need for an intervention to bend the curve of opioid related deaths. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of overdose deaths due to opioids has quadrupled since 1999. Therefore, in order to increase regulation of this addictive drug, many health officials are advocating for a special pain-tracking database system. This database system will act as a safeguard against over prescribing opioid drugs to patients and a way to monitor national trends in drug utilization. Physicians will be able to cross-check that patients have not already received prescriptions from other doctors and to check against drug interactions. Before prescribing, physicians may need to log into this database system which does add another tech requirement to their already busy day. Therefore, for this new bill to gain widespread support among providers, the new system must be seamlessly integrated into the workflow of physicians requiring very minimal additional steps to use. Altogether, it is a proactive way to reduce misuse and improve the quality of care.
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Workgroup Update:
Baptist Health CIO Addresses Council of Data Analytics Experts
David Bensema, Chief Information Officer of Baptist Health, addressed the Council of Data Analytics Experts on Tuesday. Dave provided an overview of the steps Baptist took to implement population health data analytics to over 200 sites of care. He discussed the challenges and successes that they faced dealing with converging data streams from multiple platforms across the state as well as their initial lessons learned. Audio and slides of the session can be downloaded here. For more information about the Council, please contact Claudia.Ellison@ehidic.org
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NY Physicians Must Now Prescribe Electronically
As of March 27, 2016 practitioners, excluding veterinarians, in the state of New York are now mandated to exclusively prescribe all controlled and non-controlled substances electronically. New York State is the first in the nation to to penalize physicians who fail to use electronic methods of prescribing medication. Regulations for Electronic Prescribing of Controlled Substances (EPCS) were first finalized on March 27, 2013. The recent modernization of prescription technology is intended to improve the quality of care by reducing medical errors and increasing efficiency.
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ONC Reveals Large Discrepancy in Meaningful Use
In a study conducted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, reveals that there is a rather large discrepancy between physicians participating in the Medicare Meaningful Use program and clinicians operating in Medicaid. The study is a retrospective analysis of over 865,000 physicians participating in Stage One of MU from 2011 and 2013. Researchers found that by 2013 eight in 10 physicians in the Medicare part of the program achieved Meaningful Use, as opposed to only one-third in the Medicaid incentive program. The researchers concluded that, “continued outreach and technical assistance that demonstrate strong interaction between meaningful use of health IT and delivery reform many facilitate further adoption of both initiatives.”
Health App Helped Cardiac Patients Lose Weight
A study conducted by the Mayo Clinic has found a positive association between weight loss and the use of a health app among cardiac rehabilitation patients. This randomized trial involved 80 patients who were on average 68 years and ad acute coronary syndrome, which includes heart attack and unstable angina. Patients were randomly assigned to the regular cardiac care group or to the health app intervention group. Participants in the intervention group were asked to record their exercise habits in the app twice a week and also had access to educational messages, videos, articles, and heart health-related quizzes and tips. The results were that patients in normal rehabilitative care lost two pounds after the 12-week program and the patients in the intervention lost an impressive nine pounds. This shows a relationship between weight-loss and personalized technology-based intervention strategies on a mobile platform.
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Ransomware Becoming More of a Problem in Healthcare
In recent months, ransomware attacks are becoming more prevalent among the healthcare industry. Last November, the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology declared in a report that 2016 will be “the year of ransomware”. Two weeks ago, Methodist Hospital in Kentucky was attacked by hackers. The hospital has now released that they did not pay the hackers to release the medical records, fending off the attack in-house. Three hospitals have been hit in California in the past two months, Chino Valley and Desert Valley hospitals are recent victims, with Hollywood Medical Center paying $17,000 to regain access to their medical records. Just this week, MedStar Health in Washington, D.C. was hit by a crippling cyber-attack with the FBI investigating whether it was the most recent victim. In response, federal policymakers are calling for greater protections against the ransomware threat. Last week, a Federal Trade Commissioner and Congressman Ted Lieu, (D-CA) came out in favor of expanded protections in Congressional testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
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