CHICAGO – June 26, 2017 - The American Health Information Management Association
(AHIMA) and the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee 215
Health Informatics (ISO/TC 215) are pleased to announce the publication of a new educational
standard, “ISO/Technical Report (TR) 18638:2017, Health Informatics - Guidance on health
information privacy education in healthcare organizations”
(URL: https://www.iso.org/standard/63100.html).

Patient record matching has been a key area of emphasis for healthcare in the US, with several major efforts to identify best practices in the past decade. Because of a lack of a national patient identifier, several distinct approaches to patient matching in both the public and private sectors have emerged, which do not appear to be converging. One major focus of a number of patient matching initiatives is the identification of a core set of data elements found in most patient records, regardless of setting, to facilitate matching. These initiatives have also not yet converged. Some organizations participate in master patient index (MPI) deployments within their agency or jurisdiction. But participation in a shared MPI can also be challenging, and policies and processes for synchronizing record changes, among other issues, must be carefully considered. “Promising practices” should be identified from those jurisdictions that have lived through a migration to an enterprise MPI. While the healthcare ecosystem has learned a great deal, this is an area where constant quality improvement must be applied. The healthcare community must monitor the disparate public and private initiatives to solve the patient matching challenge, and adjust as needed to accommodate approaches intended to be universally implemented.

A 5-tier pyramid best describes the impact of different types of public health interventions and provides a frameworktoimprovehealth. At the base of this pyramid, indicating interventions with the greatest potential impact, are efforts to address socioeconomic determinants of health. Frieden. Am J Pub Health. 2010.

On July 24, the new administration kicked off their version of interoperability work with a public meeting of the incumbent trust brokers. They invited the usual suspects Carequality, CARIN Alliance, CommonWell, Digital Bridge, DirectTrust, eHealth Exchange, NATE, and SHIEC with the goal of driving for an understanding of how these groups will work with each other to solve information blocking and longitudinal health records as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act.

We live and work in a technology-driven, information-focused world. My colleagues and I are highly educated and trained; we spend our days interacting with the world through laptops, smart phones, and tablets. We are knowledge workers, not clerks, and most (but surely not all) of this technology-enabled work is professional and not clerical work. Why would we think physicians and other clinicians would also not be actively engaged with digital applications throughout their day?

Healthcare Organizations and Clinical Research Organizations are challenged with how to exchange and synchronize unstructured data in a worldwide environment. Because of the size of the files, number of files, divergent platforms and network infrastructures, companies are challenges with how to securely and efficiently move data. How to address this need is what we have helped organizations with of all sizes and types.

CALL FOR PUBLIC COMMENTS Due July24, 2017

Date: June 20, 2017
Subject: AHIMA-IHE White Paper on Patient Demographics–Please comment by July 24.

Dear Colleagues:
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) and American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) invite you to submit comments on the White Paper entitled Patient Registration Demographic Data Capture and Exchange.

The White Paper was developed by the IHE Patient Care Coordination (PCC) Committee with participation of the AHIMA Standards Task Force. It is based on the AHIMA Patient Registration Use Case and specifies the requirements and constraints for patient demographic data that should be collected and exchanged for patient registration during an emergency department visit at a healthcare organization.

These data requirements may be proposed to be published as future IHE Technical Framework Volume 4: United States National Extension to the IHE ITI Patient Administration Management (PAM) Profile for the message-based data exchange.

Please download the White Paper here. URL: http://ihe.net/uploadedFiles/Documents/PCC/IHE_PCC_WP_PR_Rev1.0_2017-06-...

Please download the Public Comment Form here or see form attached.
The form contains instructions for recording and submitting your comments.

Thank you for your contribution in developing standards for HIM practices.

Sincerely,

Diana Warner
Director, Standards | Standards
Email: diana.warner@ahima.org

Blog: Mark Segal, GE Healthcare - In Part 1 of this post, I provided an overview of the new Medicare Quality Payment Program (QPP) proposed in response to the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), which sets out a path to value-based Medicare physician payment. The CMS proposed rule implementing MACRA was released April 27; comments are due June 27. In Part 2, I summarize healthcare IT (HIT) implications of the QPP and provide my initial observation on the proposed rule.

Blog: Mark Segal, GE Healthcare - I recently returned from GE Healthcare Digital’s major customer meeting, Centricity LIVE. While at this meeting, which provided many opportunities to speak with customers about their priorities, I presented on the new CMS Quality Payment Program (QPP) called for by the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), which sets out a path to value-based Medicare physician payment.