Healthcare IT News For VARs — January 9, 2015
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
In this week’s news, The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) introduces information on Stage 3 Meaningful Use (MU), and the United States Postal Service (USPS) investigates a data breach that could include theft of healthcare information on workers.
HHS Hints At Stage 3 MU Details
In this article from Government Health IT, HHS has announced that Stage 3 MU will focus more on creating a sustainable future for EHR (electronic health records) use. It refers to the third stage of the program as “a flexible, yet clearer framework to ensure future sustainability of the EHR program.” Additionally, it promises minor changes to the reporting period, timelines, and the overall MU program itself. Stage 3 is scheduled to kick off in 2017.
More Controlled Substance e-Prescriptions Being Accepted
Pharmacy Times reports that the number of pharmacies that are accepting e-prescriptions for controlled substances (like opioids) has increased. Researchers out of the University Of Mississippi School Of Pharmacy and University Of Toledo College Of Pharmacy, along with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), found that the number of pharmacies set up to accept e-prescriptions for controlled substances jumped from 18 percent in July 2012 to 30 percent in December 2013.
Potential Data Breach For A Half Million USPS Workers
A data breach that affected 750,000 USPS employees and 2.9 million customers has been found to have extended into healthcare information. NextGov reported that 485K employees’ health information, including injury diagnoses, procedure codes, and additional information were potentially compromised during the breach. The impact of the breach may have been mitigated by the fact that the Postal Service proactively took steps to obtain current address information for many employees.
FHIR And Interoperability: The Future
Government Health IT discusses Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR), the proposed interoperability standard developed by healthcare IT standards body, HL7. FHIR is considered the next generation in interoperability, because it takes a modern, Web services approach used by companies such as Google and Facebook. The primary advantage of FHIR, is that it allows for the exchange of individual pieces of information. This is a stark contrast to the current standard in use today, C-CDA (Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture), which allows only for the transfer of entire documents. Read the entire article here.
More Pediatricians Are Using EHRs — But Cost Is Still An Issue
Between the years 2009 and 2012, the number of pediatricians using EHRs increased from 58 percent to 79 percent. Still, only 14 percent of doctors in the specialty use a fully functional EHR, with solo, and two-physician practices being the least likely to use electronic records, according to Medscape. The survey reflected a general belief that younger clinicians were better adapted to using electronic records, and that rural practices had a slight advantage in adoption over suburban practices (87 percent vs. 72 percent).
Healthcare IT Talking Points
Health IT Analytics features an article by Luke Shulman, principal consultant for Arcadia Healthcare Solutions who writes about the recent increase in focus on EHR usability and design. Shulman discusses user interfaces, MVC (model-view-controller) frameworks, visualization libraries, and includes an example of what a user interface might look like. He states: “In the last few years, extremely powerful, fast, intuitive and beautiful interfaces have become more and more commonplace. There is no good reason why users in the healthcare domain — physicians, nurses, medical assistants, administrative staff, leadership, and, yes, patients — shouldn’t have the same expectations. If Facebook still looked like it did when it was thefacebook, there would be far fewer Likes.”
For more news and insights, visit BSMinfo’s Healthcare IT Resource Center.