By Kate Goodrich MD – When individuals and their families need to make important decisions about health care, they seek a reliable way to understand the best choice for themselves or their loved ones. That’s why over the past decade, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published information about the quality of care across the five different health care settings that most families encounter.
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Who doesn’t like a good list? Whether you are on it, know someone on it, or aspire to be on it, you always want to read the list. Here are some interesting lists I think deserve sharing, top #HIT100, best hospitals, Most Wired Hospitals, best value Dual MBA & Health Management Degrees, best places to work, best work perks.
By Bob Grant – HHS Office for Civil Rights has released new guidance about how HIPAA-beholden entities can better equip themselves to deal with ransomware attacks. Ransomware is a targeted kind of malware attack that takes data ‘hostage.’ The attackers responsible then give the organization a countdown to a time at which they expect to receive a ‘ransom’ in exchange for restored access to the withheld data.
By Matt Fisher – After promising to provide guidance and insight for a breaking issue, the OCR came out with ransomware guidance under HIPAA. One major issue for debate was whether a ransomware attack constitutes a HIPAA breach. The guidance provides insight into where OCR is coming from and what it expects the industry to do in response to a ransomware attack.
By D’Arcy Gue – Given the IT revolution within hospitals today, how your Service Desk analysts handle physicians and other users is more critical than ever. Disruptive trends such as sophisticated new EHRs, widespread use of devices and apps, and the growth of cloud-based services should not equate to disrupted customer service.
By Arlene Bierman MD – A hallmark of AHRQ’s work is providing evidence-based information to help clinicians and patients make the best possible treatment decisions. AHRQ’s mission is to increase the use of evidence in practice to improve both outcomes for individuals and population health.
By Don Livsey – Big data, informatics, business intelligence, and data mining have all been floated as “silver bullets” to solve the riddle of healthcare reform. One that will likely have the biggest impact, however, is population health. HealthcareIT News recently reported that population health and data analytics are the top two topics of interest for 2016.
By Jeremy Guttman – A common misconception is that an electronic health record (EHR) can close referral loops and provide high-performance referral management for primary care practices. However, not long after EHRs were implemented, users quickly realized that EHRs alone are not able to establish a pipeline that allows data to flow between PCPs and specialists from different organizations.
By John Halamka – “Do we need more or less healthcare IT regulation and legislation” is that we need the right amount of the right regulations/legislation. Sometimes when clinicians prescribe medication, although it does therapeutic good, it creates side effects which need to be addressed by changing a dose or by adding additional medications.