healthcare information news from FierceHealthIT

A new study from the Center for Information Technology Leadership at Partners Healthcare System in Boston has come up with a detailed analysis of how much money interoperable PHRs could save Read more...

In theory, it doesn't make sense to move ahead with major IT initiatives until the industry has at least some clue as to how to define key terms. However, a recent effort by the National Alliance for Read more...

Last week, HHS has awarded $22.5 million in contracts to nine HIEs to begin trial implementations of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). HHS awarded contracts to CareSpark, which serves Read more...

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, like virtually all of its peers, was eager to create an interoperable infrastructure linking up all patient care information. The project was huge. UPMC is an integrated health system with 19 hospitals, almost 5,000 physicians and nearly 400 outpatient sites. These various sites were supported by a patchwork of EMRs and other clinical systems, which, though best of breed, didn't communicate with each other. At first, the health system build more …

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A new study by the Government Accountability Office has concluded that the systems used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to send and receive bills and communicate with providers are riddled with at least 47 security holes. According to the GAO, the CMS network hasn't implemented sufficiently secure user identification and authentication, user authorization, system boundary protection, cryptography, and auditing and security event monitoring. CMS also failed to make …

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Oops. More than 40 percent of federal contractors to the Medicare and Tricare programs and state Medicaid agencies responding to a survey by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said they had experienced privacy breaches involving personal healthcare information of beneficiaries, according to a study of 378 contractors and agencies.

Was outsourcing a factor? Kinda sounds like it. More than 90 percent of Medicare contractors and state Medicaid agencies and 63 percent of …

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Though the ability to collaborate and share information is a critical component of modern IT infrastructures, it is often lacking in healthcare environments, where siloed information is the frustrating norm. Unfortunately, the information is housed on proprietary computing architectures that can't always be accessed by different platforms.

So IBM said last week it is open sourcing technology to the Eclipse Foundation's Open Healthcare Framework project in an effort to bridge the …

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