EMR Implementation & HITECH Act Blog
A blog for doctors and medical office staff seeking assistance with EMR and the HITECH Act.
Category Archives: HIPAA
2010
MIPPA Provides Incentives for E-Prescribing
Continue reading »
American health care providers write close to 3 billion prescriptions per year, according to a number of estimates, with about 80% of them being written by hand. A recent study conducted by the Weill Cornell Medical School in New York found that about 4 of every 10 handwritten prescriptions had an error while the rate of errors found in electronic prescriptions is around one-seventh of that, or about 6%.
2010
Business Associates Now Subject To Security Rules and Penalties
The HITECH Act was signed into law just one year ago. That wouldn’t be noteworthy, except that at the one-year anniversary of its signing, HIPAA privacy rules became applicable to business associates of covered entities.
Previously, covered entities weren’t subject to these rules, except to the extent that they were governed by their business associate agreements (BAAs).
Continue reading »
Filed under: HIPAA, HITECH Act
Tagged: HIPAA, HITECH Act, HITECH and HIPAA
2010
Using Social Media in a Medical Office? Be Careful!
Are you a health care professional working in a medical office? Do you tweet? Friend? Text? Chat? A recent post in a media-oriented blog got us thinking. If your work life involves accessing or being around sensitive medical information normally associated with a medical office, you may want to reconsider how you use social media in relation to your practice.
With social media, it’s possible you may be inadvertently exposing yourself to the all-too-real risk of violating someone’s privacy. You could easily run afoul of HIPAA regulations and rack up potentially huge fines. Here are a few questions to ask of yourself and your colleagues:
Continue reading »
Filed under: HIPAA, Medical Office Technology
Tagged: HIPAA and Social Media, Patient Privacy
2009
The Acronyms of HITECH: What Do They All Mean? (Part 1)
The effort to create an NHIN and implement electronic medical records/electronic health records (EMR/EHRs) available through RHIOs while still complying with HIPAA has created an alphabet soup of terms, acronyms and initials in various combinations.
To help you sort out what all these terms mean, we have created a short glossary. This is Part 1 (Part 2 will be published tomorrow). Because almost everything here seems to be subject to change, this will be a living document of sorts.
Continue reading »
2009
HHS Publishes New Data Breach Penalties
As we talked about in an earlier post (The HITECH Act and Encryption), there are penalties to be paid if all the medical data you are collecting in your electronic medical records (EMRs) should fall into the wrong hands. PC Healthstop is keeping close tabs on these new HITECH implementation regulations as they roll out, so we can provide you with any new details as they become available.
The government – specifically Health and Human Services (HHS) – has just issued an interim final regulation about breaches of the electronic medical records (EMRs).
The maximum penalties used to be $100 per violation, to a maximum of just $25,000 for all related violations. Under the new rules, the penalties start at $100 / $25,000. There will now be 5 levels of severity, ending at $50,000 per violation with a cap of $1.5 million!
To see all the details go to HIPAA Administrative Simplication: Enforcement , (page 56123).
Rich Silverman
PCHS Blogging Team
Photo by Jonathunder courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution sharealike license.
Filed under: EMR, Electronic Medical Records, HIPAA, HITECH Act
Tagged: EMR Breach Penalties, EMR Breach Penalty, HIPAA Violations, HITECH Penalties
2009
RHIOs: The Glue That Will Hold HIT Together
Continue reading »
Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) will serve as an infrastructure for – and enable sharing of — electronic health information. A RHIO is designed to pull together all of the organizations, facilities and individuals in the race to computerize health data. Implementers such as hospitals, medical offices, laboratories, payers, insurers and patients all have a stake and must have their issues taken into account. That’s where RHIOs come in.
2009
Welcome to a New EMR Blog for Health Care Professionals
Starting in the 4th century B.C., when Hippocrates first uttered the words “Primum Non Nocere” and continuing through February 2009, when President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, there have been rules and regulations governing the practice of medicine.
Some rules, such as that famous dictum “first do no harm”, are easy to understand. Others, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) are not.
Continue reading »
Filed under: Electronic Medical Records, HIPAA, HITECH Act
Tagged: EHR, EHR Implementation, EMR, HITECH Compliance, HITECH Incentives
2009
The Acronyms of HITECH: What Do They All Mean? (Part 2)
Continue reading »
We ended our blog posts in 2009 addressing a common dilemma: how do you wade through the alphabet soup of acronyms surrounding the HITECH Act? A single sentence can contain tons of upper case letters which you may or may not be 100% familiar with. To help you sort out what all these terms mean, we created a short glossary. We begin 2010 with Part 2 (Part 1 is here). Because HITECH-related terminology is evolving, this will be a living document of sorts. If you see one we missed, or one whose definition has changed, let us know and we’ll do our best to keep it current.
Recent Comments