Today’s Computerworld has a great article about the issues of mixing social media and healthcare.As hospitals and clinics formulate social networking policies, there are three broad considerations:1. Given HIPAA and HITECH privacy and breach rules, how can you best prevent the disclosure of protected healthcare information on insecure social media sites?2. Given the distraction factor [...]

Last week Surescripts released its annual report on the state of e-prescribing.I think you’ll find the summary quite valuable as it illustrates the impact of Meaningful Use Stage 1 on providers and the industry. Here are the high points from the report:Meaningful UseBy the end of 2011, 58% of office-based physicians in the United States [...]

Last week, the Technology Workgroup of the Massachusetts State HIE Advisory Committee was asked to address an interesting policy and technology question.When a payload of data (a clinical summary, a public health transaction, a lab result) is sent from provider to provider, what data should be included in the electronic envelope used in the sending [...]

I’ve written many times about the Bring Your Own Device movement (BYOD) and the need for increasing security controls. For years, we’ve controlled device settings on Blackberry devices with the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). We force passwords, encryption, and device memory wipes for ten failed passwords so that every user has enterprise enforced securityWith [...]

As the nation begins its pilots of pioneer Accountable Care Organizations and shares more data for care coordination and population management, IT departments will be asked to make clinical records available to increasing numbers of loosely affiliated clinicians and staff. The challenge will be managing the authentication and authorization of a diverse population of legitimate [...]

I recently presented a webinar outlining the the IT work ahead to support Accountable Care Organizations.Here are the slides that I used.I recommended five priorities to create a foundation for care management and population health:1. Universal adoption of EHRs – every clinician in an ACO needs to record data electronically, ideally using the same EHR [...]

Meg Aranow, the former CIO of Boston Medical Center and now a principal at Aranow Consulting recently assembled several of the IT leaders in Boston to discuss opportunities for reducing costs and enhancing infrastructure by pooling our collective resources. Here’s her guest post describing the exploration:“I recently met with IT leadership from Partners Healthcare, [...]

I’ve written several posts about BIDMC’s use of “private cloud“approaches to host electronic records and gather community-wide quality data. Healthcare organizations have avoided the use of “public cloud” because of HIPAA/HITECH privacy concerns, lack of breach indemnification/data integrity guarantees, and the unwillingness of many cloud providers to sign business associate agreements.Although it has not [...]

In my 15 years as CIO, I’ve experienced a gamut of sales techniques – the “end of quarter deal never to be repeated,” the “we’re your partner and you always get our best price,” and the selling of products that don’t yet exist.However, today I experienced one of the most reprehensible – The Salesman End [...]

The Office of the National Coordinator asked me to present the Massachusetts Provider Directory approach to the Provider Directory Community of Practice (CoP) on March 21.Here’s the powerpoint that I presented.It highlights the decisions we had to make (Entity v. Individual, Central v. Federated, web API verses LDAP, etc)Issue: Should we include organizations, individuals or [...]