Group items tagged

In May 2008, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) awarded an approximately $450,000 contract to Booz Allen Hamilton to assess and evaluate the scope of the medical identity theft problem in the U.S. Medical Identity Theft Medical identity theft is a specific type of identity theft which occurs when a person uses someone else's personal health identifiable information, such as insurance information, Social Security Number, health care file, or medical records, without the individual's knowledge or consent to obtain medical goods or services, or to submit false claims for medical services. There is limited information available about the scope, depth, and breadth of medical identity theft. Dr. Robert Kolodner, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, has noted that medical identity theft stories are being documented at an increasing rate, bringing to light serious financial, fraud, and patient care issues. ONC recognizes that health IT is an important tool to combat the threat of medical identity theft. We are seeking input from the public and other government agencies to better understand how health IT can be utilized to prevent and detect medical identity theft as well as build consumer trust in electronic health information exchange. ONC believes it is imperative to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of this issue from a variety of perspectives, and to create an open forum for dialogue to work proactively to address medical identity theft. Medical Identity Theft final report. The report summarizing health IT and medical identity theft issues raised at the town hall was completed January 15, 2009 and sets forth potential actions the Federal government and other stakeholders can undertake in working toward prevention, detection, and remediation of medical identify theft.

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to computerize all of America's medical records within five years. He made the pledge last week in a speech at George Mason University. "This will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests," he said. "But it just won't save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system." But the road to digitized medical records will be a tough and expensive one, CNN Money reported. Today, only about 8% of the country's 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians use electronic medical records. There is also the issue of patient privacy. Numerous hospitals have faced security issues since moving to electronic medical records. The Industry Standard reported on a security breach at a Los Angeles hospital last month. And then there is the cost. Studies done by Harvard, RAND and the Commonwealth Fund peg the cost of the digitization plan between at least $75 billion to $100 billion, according to the CNN article. However, the health care industry spends $2 trillion dollars a year, so the $100 billion may be well worth the long-term savings.

The federal government has a key role to play in researching and organizing a national response to the problem of medical identity theft, authors of a government-funded study have concluded. Patients, providers, payers and other members of the healthcare community also must join in the effort to combat a problem that is serious, although as yet its scope is not fully known, the report stated. Contractor Booz Allen Hamilton released the report last week. It represents the final phase of the $450,000 study funded last year by the Office of the National Coordinator at HHS. The study consisted of three parts, the first being to review existing knowledge about medical identity theft as well as policies and practices to prevent it. Those findings were included in a research paper on the subject released last October. The second phase involved a public meeting Oct. 15, 2008, the same day the paper was released, to "open a dialogue about medical identity theft within the healthcare industry. The final phase, the 26-page report, includes 31 "potential actions," which are recommendations that could form a national policy on medical identity theft. While medical identity theft "may be categorized as healthcare fraud," according to the report, "there are unique and important distinctions of medical identity theft that need to become more commonly understood to address this issue effectively." One difference, the report authors noted, is that the primary motive behind healthcare fraud "is most often monetary gain, such as when fraudulent providers bill for more expensive services than those rendered. However, medical identity theft tends to be focused on the use of someone else's information to gain goods, services and healthcare." IT could hurt, help Therefore, undetected medical identity theft poses medical risks to its victims, since their medical records may contain inaccurate and potentially harmful information that may cause them not to be con

LOS ANGELES-Fifteen hospital workers have been fired and another eight disciplined for looking at medical records of octuplet mother Nadya Suleman without permission, hospital officials said Monday. Kaiser Permanente reported the violations of health care privacy laws to the state and has warned employees at its Bellflower facility to keep away from Suleman's records unless they have a medical purpose, said hospital spokesman Jim Anderson. "Despite the notoriety of this case, to us this person is a patient who deserves the privacy that all our patients get," Anderson told The Associated Press. Anderson would not elaborate on how the other eight employees were reprimanded, saying only that the punishments were significant. A similar privacy breach at UCLA hospitals led to celebrities' medical information getting leaked to tabloids in recent years, including details of Farrah Fawcett's cancer treatment showing up in the National Enquirer. Anderson said Kaiser does not believe any of Suleman's information was shared with the media, based on the results of their inquiry. The 33-year-old single mother of 14 gave birth to her octuplets on Jan. 26 at Kaiser's hospital in Bellflower, about 17 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Her attorney Jeff Czech said Suleman does not plan to file a lawsuit, though he suspects Kaiser employees were looking for medical information on Suleman's sperm donor. He said the name is not listed on the Advertisement medical records. "She trusts Kaiser and they said they'd look into it," Czech said. "We feel that they're on top of it and are taking care of it." Anderson could not provide details about when Suleman's medical records were accessed and by what kind of hospital employee. He said Kaiser had warned its employees about patient confidentiality rules before Suleman checked into the hospital in December. "Even though no one knew she was there, they knew she was going to have a lot of babies," Anderson said. "The extra monitoring he

Hundreds of medical records kept by a longtime Acton family doctor who abruptly closed his practice last year are about to be destroyed, leaving patients without crucial information and exposing a gap in state law about who owns abandoned medical records. On April 8, a Lynn storage company is scheduled to discard the records and auction the equipment left by Dr. Ronald T. Moody, who was evicted from his office last September as state regulators pursued him, saying he was practicing without a license. Many of Moody's former patients have no idea that their records are slated for destruction: None has been notified, nor does the law require such notice. "We throw people's lives away on a daily basis, and, believe me, we go out of our way to try and find someone" to salvage belongings, said Jim Appleyard, owner of the storage company that was hired by Moody's former landlord to clean out the office and store the items for six months, as required by law. But the idea of dumping hundreds of patients' files without them knowing about it bothered Appleyard. Unable to find Moody, he contacted the state Board of Registration in Medicine and pleaded to take the dozens of boxes of records. The board regulates doctors and administers rules governing medical records of physicians in private and group practices.

The Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower has been hit with a $187,500 fine for failing for a second time to prevent unauthorized access to confidential patient information, state pubic health officials said today. [Updated at 3 p.m.: A spokesman for the hospital said the fine was part of the ongoing investigation into employees improperly accessing the medical records of Nadya Suleman and her children. Disciplinary action has been taken against the employees, said Jim Anderson, a hospital spokesman. All the incidents occurred in January; a previous post said they had occurred in April and May.] State officials said Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center compromised the privacy of four patients when eight employees improperly accessed records. This is the second penalty against the hospital, officials said. The hospital was fined $250,000 in May for failing to keep employees from snooping in the medical records of Nadya Suleman, the woman who set off a media frenzy after giving birth to octuplets in January. The fine was the first penalty imposed and largest allowed under a new state law enacted last year after the widely publicized violations of privacy at UCLA Medical Center involving Farrah Fawcett, Britney Spears, California First Lady Maria Shriver and other celebrities. "We are very concerned with violations of patient confidentiality and their potential harm to the residents of California," said Dr. Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health. "Medical privacy is a fundamental right and a critical component of quality medical care in California."

Electronic medical recordkeeping may not cut the overall cost of care, but by eliminating redundant procedures and reducing errors, quality may be improved. When physician Andrew Wiesenthal needs to work out a problem, he runs around Lake Merritt, across the street from his Oakland (Calif.) office at Kaiser Permanente. As one of the main drivers behind Kaiser's decades-long, multibillion-dollar effort to overhaul the way patient health records are kept, Wiesenthal has had a lot of laps to run. Doctors and other medical professionals across the country will be working through similar challenges in the coming years. President Barack Obama plans to spend $17.2 billion to induce care providers to maintain patient records electronically, scrapping the current paper-based system. The Obama Administration wants electronic health records for every American by 2014. Obama's predecessor also made a big push for electronic recordkeeping, and many doctors and hospital administrators see upgrading recordkeeping as a good way to improve care. Yet, fewer than 2% of acute care hospitals have a comprehensive electronic health record system in place, with another 8% to 12% using a basic system, according to a study published by The New England Journal of Medicine in March. Adoption isn't much better among physicians. Only 4% have a comprehensive system in place, with another 13% using basic systems, according to a study published in the journal in July. Kaiser Permanente is one of the few exceptions. Today, all of its medical clinics and two-thirds of its hospitals operate in a paperless environment and the rest are scheduled to be completely digitized by next year. Across the system, about 14,000 physicians access electronic medical records for 8.7 million patients in nine states and the District of Columbia.

"For five days as her husband lay in his hospital bed suffering from kidney cancer, Regina Holliday begged doctors and nurses for his medical records, and for five days she never received them. On the sixth day, her husband needed to be transferred to another hospital -- without his complete medical records. "When Fred arrived at the second hospital, they couldn't give him any pain medication because they didn't know what drugs he already had in his system, and they didn't want to overdose him," says Holliday, who lives in Washington. "For six hours he was in pain, panicking, while I ran back to the first hospital and got the rest of the records." Despite a federal law requiring hospitals and doctors to release medical records to patients who ask for them, patients are reporting they have a hard time accessing them leading to complications like the ones the Holliday family experienced. 'What part of "Give us our damn data" do you not understand?'"

Privacy law matters in ways not readily apparant until they hit home.

Just days after President Obama signed a law giving billions of dollars to develop electronic health records, a university technology professor submitted a paper showing that he was able to uncover tens of thousands of medical files containing names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients seeking treatment for conditions ranging from AIDS to mental health problems. Using peer-to-peer applications, which computer users download to share files, most commonly music and movies, M. Eric Johnson, director of the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., was able to access electronic medical records on computers that had the peer-to-peer programs stored on their hard drives. The medical files contained detailed personal data on physical and mental diagnoses, which a hacker could use to not only embarrass a patient but also to commit medical fraud. One of the largest stashes of medical data Johnson discovered during two weeks of research he conducted in January was a database containing two spreadsheets from a hospital he declined to identify. The files contained records on 20,000 patients, which included names, Social Security numbers, insurance carriers and codes for diagnoses. The codes identified by name four patients infected with AIDS, the mental illnesses that 201 others were diagnosed as having and cancer findings for 326 patients. Data also included links to four major hospitals and 355 insurance carriers that provided health coverage to 4,029 employers and 266 doctors.

Last week, President Barack Obama convened a health-care summit in Washington to identify programs that would improve quality and restrain burgeoning costs. He stated that all his policies would be based on rigorous scientific evidence of benefit. The flagship proposal presented by the president at this gathering was the national adoption of electronic medical records -- a computer-based system that would contain every patient's clinical history, laboratory results, and treatments. This, he said, would save some $80 billion a year, safeguard against medical errors, reduce malpractice lawsuits, and greatly facilitate both preventive care and ongoing therapy of the chronically ill. Following his announcement, we spoke with fellow physicians at the Harvard teaching hospitals, where electronic medical records have been in use for years. All of us were dumbfounded, wondering how such dramatic claims of cost-saving and quality improvement could be true. The basis for the president's proposal is a theoretical study published in 2005 by the RAND Corporation, funded by companies including Hewlett-Packard and Xerox that stand to financially benefit from such an electronic system. And, as the RAND policy analysts readily admit in their report, there was no compelling evidence at the time to support their theoretical claims. Moreover, in the four years since the report, considerable data have been obtained that undermine their claims. The RAND study and the Obama proposal it spawned appear to be an elegant exercise in wishful thinking. To be sure, there are real benefits from electronic medical records. Physicians and nurses can readily access all the information on their patients from a single site. Particularly helpful are alerts in the system that warn of potential dangers in the prescribing of a certain drug for a patient on other therapies that could result in toxicity. But do these benefits translate into $80 billion annually in cost-savings? The cost-savings from avoi

A consumer group accused Google of seeking provisions in the economic stimulus package that would allow it to sell patient medical data to Google Health advertisers. Perhaps patients' biggest worry about electronic medical records is that their private health data will get into the wrong hands. To get a feel for some folks' anxiety, just take a look at this from a group called Patient Privacy Rights: "CHILLING NEWS ABOUT HEALTH PRIVACY: You Have None." (Or look at one of our many posts about health data breaches.) So it's probably not a surprise that Google, which last year launched Google Health, a personal online repository, was quick to refute a charge by a different consumer group, called Consumer Watchdog, of "a rumored [Google] lobbying effort aimed at allowing the sale of electronic medical records." The group further claimed that Google is "reportedly" pushing for items in the economic stimulus bill that would allow the company to "sell patient medical information" to advertisers. Google shot back, posting an item in its public policy blog calling the claims "100 percent false and unfounded." The company added: Google does not sell health data. In fact, one of our most steadfast privacy principles is that we don't sell our users' personal data, whether it's stored in Google Health, Gmail, or in any of our products. And from a policy perspective, we oppose the sale of medical information in the health care industry. Google's ear is likely fine tuned to this issue, considering some folks in the medical community have already pointed out the company is not a type required to follow a federal patient-privacy law called HIPAA.

The US government has now adopted a policy of fostering the adoption of electronic medical records (EMR). The policy is intended to increase the efficiency of the US healthcare system, thereby lowering costs and reducing the incidence of preventable errors. At the same time, through its The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rules, the government has set minimum standards for the security of those records. These two goals-privacy and security of these records, along with their free interchange among medical providers-can easily wind up at odds with each other. A recent study that looked at the role of state privacy laws in EMR adoption suggests that the problem is very real, as state privacy laws seem to inhibit the use of EMR by hospitals located there. The authors, based at MIT and the University of Virginia, line up a variety of data that validate their suggestion that privacy and the use of EMR may require a careful balance. So, for example, they cite some highly publicized lapses when it comes to the maintenance of patient privacy: someone once offered the records of 200,000 patients for sale on Craigslist, while hospitals have seen their own employees attempt to get at the electronic files of famous patients. Perhaps more significantly, the authors suggest that the public, as represented by their legislators, has concerns about the privacy of EMR. They found that states that have passed their own privacy laws to supplement the HIPAA rules tend to have a higher percentage of their populace signed up for the Do Not Call Registry, indicating a corresponding individual-level interest in maintaining privacy. So, they looked at whether these laws had any impact on the adoption of EMR by hospitals located in each state.

making best indexing in goggle and bing. RADJASEOTEA is a master of backlinks. You want indexing in goggle and bing. LOOK THIS www.fiverr.com/radjaseotea/making-best-super-backlink-143445

It's often the security issue that dogs Google, Microsoft and other purveyors of personal health records (PHR): How will so much personal medical data be kept safe? A tangential question for Google, however -- one that has dogged the search giant since its Google Health offering was first made available in May 2008 -- is whether Google's search-based advertising platform creates a conflict with storing personal health data. Speaking at the Mastermind Session at Everything Channel's Healthcare Summit in San Diego in November,Google Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives Alfred Spector told health care CIOs, solution providers and other attendees that Google intended Google Health as an extension of the Google brand, and it was and would continue to be entirely separate from Google's main advertising platform. Watchdog organizations have taken Google to task over that claim, however, with one, Consumer Watchdog, even accusing Google of trying to lobby Congress to allow it to sell medical records by loosening regulatory language in the stimulus bill. "The medical technology portion of the economic stimulus bill does not sufficiently protect patient privacy, and recent amendments have made this situation worse," wrote Jerry Flanagan of Consumer Watchdog in a Jan. 27 open letter to Congress. "Medical privacy must be strengthened before the measure's final passage, rather than allowing corporate interests to take advantage of the larger bill's urgency." Flanagan in the letter states that, "Google is said to be lobbying hard ... to weaken the ban currently in the draft measure on the sale of our private medical records." While Consumer Watchdog did not cite specific evidence of Google pushing for softer restrictions, Google responded to the group's claims on its Public Policy Blog last week. "The claim -- based on no evidence whatsoever -- is 100 percent false and unfounded," wrote Pablo Chavez, Google's Senior Policy Counsel. "Google does not sell health

"If you live in Texas, your medical records are definitely up for sale by the state. If you live anywhere else in the United States, they probably are for sale there, too. Medical health records provide key information to researchers, who have lobbied hard to keep them accessible, despite government concerns about the privacy of patient data. The controversy dates back to 1996, when Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to protect patients. "Researchers have very broad access rights to health care records under HIPAA," says Pam Dixon, director of a non-profit called the World Privacy Forum "The rules are pretty loose, and there are a lot of ways to get around them." That's especially true since the act wasn't designed to cover common scenarios today: records stored online in a vast, hackable cloud. In the rush to digitize all electronic health records, Dixon says not everyone is taking the proper steps to de-personalize the data and protect patients."

California regulators have fined Kaiser Permanente Bellflower (Calif.) Medical Center $250,000 for failing to keep workers from peeking at the electronic health records of Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to octuplets at the hospital in January. The fine is the first under a new state law, which took effect in January, aimed at protecting patient medical records at hospitals and carries the maximum penalty allowable. Twenty-three unauthorized staff and physicians accessed the medical records, including some at other Kaiser facilities. Seven people viewed the records more than once, according to the California Public Health Department, which licenses hospitals in the state. Kaiser fired one person who peeked at Suleman's records, 14 others resigned and eight were disciplined.

Names, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers: information Daron Breinholt did not go looking for, but found Thursday morning. He took out the trash from the shoe distribution center, where he works, in the warehouse section on Salt Lake's west side. "I was just throwing away some stuff (in a dumpster) , and it was chock full of medical records," said Breinholt. "There's everything in there from canceled checks to routing numbers. They could steal a lot identities. A lot of identities were in there." At least some of the records appeared to come from Mountain Medical Center, a chiropractic office that had been in the Murray area until some months ago. Dr. Randall Malin said through his lawyer that he did not throw away records. "It's news to him," said Attorney Robert Harrison. Salt Lake Police packed away perhaps twenty boxes of papers, and said they would protect the documents, as they dug into the matter. Surveillance video, which 2News has not been able to see, reportedly showed two people who drove up in a red pickup truck Wednesday afternoon, and unloaded the materials from a trailer.

First quarter federal reports show Google lobbied on the electronic medical records provisions of the federal economic stimulus act, contradicting the Internet giant's earlier claims that Consumer Watchdog's report of its effort was "100 percent false." Google's report shows a total expenditure of $880,000 on lobbying during the period including on "online health-related initiatives; issues relating to online personal health records, including in connection with H.R. 1: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009." Google also contracted with an outside firm, the Podesta Group, which independently reported lobbying for Google on "health information technology" and "online privacy." King and Spalding LLP also independently reported lobbying for Google on "online health-related initiatives, including health information technology provisions in H.R. 1, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act." After the nonprofit, nonpartisan Consumer Watchdog reported the "rumored" lobbying in January, Google contacted a charitable foundation about withdrawing Consumer Watchdog's funding. In a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt released today, Consumer Watchdog said the company owes the group an apology. Read Consumer Watchdog's letter here: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/LtrSchmidt042209.pdf. "It is now clear from public records that Google was lobbying Congress relating to online personal health records in connection with the economic stimulus act... What else could Google have been seeking except to be excluded from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) provisions on privacy and forbidding sale of records? Please tell us," wrote Jamie Court, Consumer Watchdog president and John M. Simpson, consumer advocate. "There is a simple way to resolve this," the letter said. "Publicly release all the substance of Google's lobbying efforts on H.R. 1. Google knows the drill: organize the information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Even a booster of electronic systems like David Blumenthal, who just started his Washington post as the national coordinator of health IT, points to a myriad of challenges when it comes to digitizing the nation's medical records. Just take a look at his piece this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which he cites technical concerns and worries about patient privacy, among other things. In an interview with the WSJ, he said problems can crop up if the systems are installed too quickly and without enough technical support. There are plenty of potential advantages that electronic records can bring, from helping hospitals and doctors get information quickly on patients' medical histories to making catches when two drugs are being prescribed that may interact dangerously together. But there are also risks: Take a look at a study in Pediatrics that cites the case of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, which initially saw a rise in the death rate for certain patients after computerizing its order-entry system, perhaps because it took longer to begin their treatment. (The hospital told the WSJ the study was "flawed," adding the mortality rate had fallen since then.) The WSJ also cites the case of a patient who was initially given an incorrect diagnosis based on a mix-up involving electronic records and a test result for another patient. Health Blog Question of the Day: What's been your experience with electronic records? Do they prevent safety problems or create new risks?

Google never fails to surprise. It's the scope and scale of their ambitions that impresses me ranging as they do from relatively simple applications that are just way cool such as Sky Map, through their Chrome Web browser (which is now looking pretty stable), to the subject of this newsletter: Google Health. Google Health, which was launched as a beta (of course) in spring 2008, is a free repository for your personal health information. Using the service you can create online health profiles for yourself, family members or others you care for (these profiles can include health conditions, medications, allergies and lab results), you can import medical records from hospitals and pharmacies, share your health records with "your care network" (which may include family members, friends and doctors), and browse an online health services directory to find services that are integrated with Google Health. After you sign up you can import your medical records from Allscripts, Anvita Health, The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, The Cleveland Clinic, CVS Caremark, Healthgrades, Longs Drugs, Medco Health Solutions, Quest Diagnostics, RxAmerica and Walgreens. What you'll wind up with if you update all of the sections is a pretty complete health profile, which means that privacy has to be a concern. Interestingly, because becoming a subscriber is voluntary it appears that the service is exempt from the provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

"Medical records for about 15,500 Northern California Kaiser patients - about 9,000 of them in the Bay Area - were compromised after thieves stole an external drive from a Kaiser employee's car last month, Kaiser officials said Tuesday." Kaiser officials said the electronic device contained patients' names, medical record numbers and possibly ages, genders, telephone numbers, addresses and general information related to their care and treatment. No Social Security numbers or financial information was contained on the drive, and Kaiser officials said there's no evidence that the information has been used inappropriately. The device was not encrypted, but some of the information was password protected. Kaiser has sent letters to the 15,500 members and the employee, who Kaiser would not identify, has been fired.

Another hospital employee fired for inappropraite access of medical records. More damage to a medical group reputation because someone failed to get the message.