CIO Fired After Others May Have Accessed Her EHR

A prominent CIO of a regional hospital system encountered the limitations of HIPAA and so-called “Protected Health Information (PHI)” when her boss fired her after a short medical leave of absence. After years working without taking vacation, a family catastrophe that affected her health prompted her to take a medical leave of absence.  She had [...]

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FDA to Recommend New Physician Certification

Table

The FDA has been receiving a great deal of criticism from the clinical community about a variety of issues, but probably none is as contentious as the ongoing patient safety issues regarding harmful drug-drug interactions and drug-gene interactions, estimated by the Institute of Medicine to cause 250,000 deaths each year in the U.S. The current [...]

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PBM versus EHR: Culture Clash?

MEDCO file

Individualizing drug therapy based on pharmacogenomics (PGx) is considered by many academic researchers and clinical experts as the “next significant domain of clinical practice” (see the American College of Clinical Pharmacology’s very informative web-based tutorial, “The Future of Medicine: Pharmacogenomics”, http://user.accp1.org/index_new.html). Drugs that are currently recommended for PGx testing by the FDA include specific medications [...]

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New Mandatory Genomics Education is Imminent

Slide bit

An HHS committee on Physician and Patient Education is developing new certification requirements for hospital physicians in genomics and pharmacogenomics.  Most hospital physicians, unless your specialty is oncology or obstetrics, are not familiar with anything but diseases inherited as classical Mendelien traits.  These new rules will require basic certification in both classical genetics and the [...]

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Personal Health Records: Hope or Hype?

Digital Divide

The Personal Health Record (PHR) should finally allow patients to control their own Protected Health Information (PHI), allow them to assign ‘agents’ such as parents acting for children, or, in the later stages of life, children acting for parents.  Eventually the goal is to enable seamless integration with the EHR and allow patients access to [...]

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Outlook for a NHIN Seems Dim

The Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) is still being defined by the Office of the National Coordinator’s Office for Health IT – more specifically the Health IT Policy Committee.  The goal appears to be to build a new infrastructure using “a collection of protocols, legal agreements, specifications, and services that enables the secure exchange of [...]

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FDA Expands Gene Testing for Drug Prescription

“The FDA considers both unwanted harmful effects and lack of efficacy to be adverse events. When considering candidates for pharmacogenomic relabeling, the FDA evaluates the severity of the adverse reaction, the degree to which genetics predicts the reaction, and the total number of individuals likely to be affected.  These factors are important in assessing the [...]

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One-on-One w/MedStar Health’s Gerry Higgins – Part 2

Gerald Higgins, PhD., MBA, MS, is not your typical CIO — that’s because Higgins is a chief innovation officer. Getting paid not to carry out EMR implementations or persuade physicians to embrace CPOE, Higgins is remunerated to “see what’s happening one or two hills over the horizon.” With a dizzying array of jobs and accomplishments [...]

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One-on-One w/MedStar Health’s Gerry Higgins

Brain

Gerald Higgins, PhD., MBA, MS, is not your typical CIO — that’s because Higgins is a chief innovation officer. Getting paid not to carry out EMR implementations or persuade physicians to embrace CPOE, Higgins is remunerated to “see what’s happening one or two hills over the horizon.” With a dizzying array of jobs and accomplishments [...]

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