Healthcare IT News For VARs — October 24, 2014

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

In this week’s news, CMS releases new guidelines on risk analysis, and the Tennessee Health Department discovers second data breach.

Healthcare CIOs Concerned About EHR Usability

Healthcare organizations are adopting EHRs (electronic health records), but CIOs are still concerned about usability. This fact was revealed in a Frost & Sullivan survey of healthcare CIOs that ran from March to May of this year. The study was conducted in conjunction with the College Of Health Information Management Executives and focused primarily on CIOs in mid- to large-sized community hospitals. Slowness of systems and a lack of precise query results topped the list of CIO concerns. Read more at EHR Intelligence.

Research Collaborative Sets Goal Of Mining Health Analytics

Statewide biomedical research collaborative, Health Sciences South Carolina has partnered with CliniWorks out of Massachusetts to form a centralized Natural Language Processing system, with the goal of improving healthcare and health research across multiple hospital networks. It’s estimated that up to 70 percent of healthcare data is either locked in free text form or unstructured and has not yet been converted into mineable, structured data. Centralizing processing and enhancement is the first step in increasing the capabilities of health researchers in mining and analyzing that data, according to GSA Business.

Study Confirms That Adding HIE/ePrescribing Data Improves Rx Lists

According to iHealthBeat, EHRs can be made to more accurately portray individuals’ medication lists when they are paired with community health information exchange (HIE) and eprescribing data. This was the result of a study conducted by the American Journal Of Managed Care that involved 858 patients admitted to two New York hospitals between September 2010 and April 2011. The patients were prescribed a total of 7,731 medications. The study found that when EHR, commercial medication data base and HIE information was combined, the accuracy rate increased to 91 percent.

CMS Releases New Guidance On Security Risk Analysis

The Centers For Medicare And Medicaid Services has released new guidance around security risk analysis. Available here on the agency website, the recommendations include details on how a provider can meet the “Protect Electronic Health Information” core objective for the EHR incentive program. Providers looking to meet the requirement in Meaningful Use Stage 2 will have to complete not only the Stage 1 analysis requirements, but also the data encryption and security measures for Stage 2. A tip sheet and a 10-step plan are also available.

Second Data Breach In Tennessee Health Department Move

The Metro Public Health Department in Nashville, TN, is left addressing its second data breach since its move in July of this year. The first involved the loss of 1,700 index cards with the name, date of birth, social security numbers, addresses, and medical coding of patients in the Children’s Special Services program going back to 2003. According to Health IT Security, it has been recently discovered that a file cabinet with files on patients with HIV was mistakenly sent to a Metro school. An investigation into the breaches has begun.

Healthcare IT Talking Points

This article from Fierce Health IT examines the need for computer-assisted coding (CAC) as facilities manage the transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10, by October of next year. It covers an HIMSS Analytics report that forecasts a high growth rate in the CAC sector as compared to 24 other support service applications. Other applications considered to be on a “healthy” growth path include:

• dictation with speech recognition
• ambulatory EHRs
• disaster recovery systems
• single sign-on tools
• electronic forms management

For more news and insights, visit BSMinfo’s Healthcare IT Resource Center.