The HIT Policy Committee’s Meaningful Use Workgroup struggled to reach consensus on key Stage 2 requirements, with some accusing the group of being timid in certain areas, while others characterized proposed requirements as unrealistic in the given timeframe. Specifically in the area of providing patients electronic access to their hospital visit summaries through a Web-based […]
The Most Powerful Person in Healthcare IT
It was not immediately clear, at least to me, that HITECH would have the effect it has. By that I mean it would utterly and completely transform the healthcare IT industry. It took me some time to realize that, through Meaningful Use, the government’s stipulations of what it would take to earn the incentive funds […]
Privacy & Security Tiger Team Hunts Balance
The HIT Policy Committee’s new Privacy and Security Tiger Team workgroup is striving to establish the requirements that intermediaries in personal health information (PHI) message transactions will be subject to. Under HIPAA, parties which have access to PHI are deemed covered entities (CEs), required to establish business associate agreements (BAAs) which obligate them to handle the data in certain ways. With the rise of health information exchange under the HITECH Act, the Office of the National Coordinator created the Tiger Team to provide it with guidance in governing health information organizations (HIOs) — or third-party intermediaries which have varying degrees of involvement with the messages.