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Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic and a member of the HIT Policy Committee, told other members of the committee and new National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, M.D., she was concerned that forces promoting the PCAST vision also stood to gain from its adoption. “What is showing up in blogs — I have seen and sometimes been […]
At its final meeting — during which Chair Paul Egerman sought to put the finishing touches on its upcoming report to the HIT Policy Committee — some members of ONC’s PCAST Report Workgroup chafed at their narrow mandate of only suggesting ways the report’s principles could be integrated with Meaningful Use, not commenting on its […]
Because the industry lacks a standardized UEL message wrapper, there’s little chance CMS/ONC can inject significant PCAST-report principles into Stage 2 of its Meaningful Use incentive program, according to Stan Huff and Dixie Baker, both members of the PCAST Workgroup, a subgroup of ONC’s HIT Policy Committee. Workgroup Chair Paul Egerman, a retired software entrepreneur, […]
Rather than requiring all eligible providers and hospitals fill out what is generally the same checklist for Meaningful Use, organizations which prove they are achieving outcomes far beyond the norm could qualify right off the bat, suggested National Coordinator for Healthcare IT David Blumenthal, M.D., at the October HIT Policy Committee meeting. While the former […]
Devan McGraw and Paul Egerman, respectively chair and co-chair of the HIT Policy Committee’s Privacy and Security Tiger Team, entered this month’s full committee meeting looking for approval of the letter and recommendations they put together over the summer. And while they got that approval in the end, it was only after more than 30 […]
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.
Safety concerns took center stage at the HIT Policy Committee meeting today in Washington, D.C., as Certification and Adoption Workgroup Co-chairs Paul Egerman and Marc Probst reported their recommendations on those issues to the full committee. The workgroup’s report was a refinement on an earlier presentation Egerman, a software entrepreneur, and Probst, CIO at Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare, gave after receiving testimony about HIT-related patient safety incidents on Feb. 25.
Ask physicians what their main complaint is with their profession, and many will say it’s the heavy burden of malpractice insurance. With legions of lawyers whose raison d’etre is to sue doctors, it’s no wonder high-risk specialties, such as surgeons and ob-gyns., must spend tens of thousands of dollars a year just in case they […]
The merits of working with the FDA to help ONC craft an EMR certification program that addresses both pre- and post-market HIT patient safety issues were discussed at the HIT Policy Committee Workgroup on Certification and Adoption meeting held this week. On one side of the debate, HIT Software Entrepreneur and Workgroup Co-Chair Paul Egerman argued that the FDA could bring some significant value to the table in crafting a program.
While a number of HIT-related patient safety issues can be traced to system usability, network stability, and end-user competence with the application in question, few are attributable to traditional software “bugs,” according to Marc Probst and Paul Egerman, HIT Policy Committee Members and co-chairs of a special hearing on such issues. “It’s amazing what end […]
