Patient Safety Institute Brings Its Pioneering Efforts to a Close After 6 years of working to build a national healthcare clinical information exchange, the Patient Safety Institute (PSI)
has chosen
to close its doors. PSI recognized early that the most pressing problem facing regional health information organizations (RHIOs)
would be the
lack of a viable, permanent source of financial support. While public funding continues to be sought for these efforts, financial
support has
never been sufficiently available or with the necessary certainty to make RHIO’s successful. PSI chose an alternative model--a
private
sector self-funding model similar to that used in the financial services industry. Unfortunately, this did not work either.
Intel, Wal-Mart, And Others Refocus To Get Worker E-Health Record System Running Dossia is starting fresh via a new partnership with Children's Hospital Boston, which is providing technological and strategic
guidance to Dossia. The company will base its personal health record system on "the underlying capabilities" of Indivo, a
system
that Children's Hospital built for its patients in 1998. Among the appeal of Children's Hospital's Indivo to Dossia is that
the
open source system provides control over health record data to patients. That's the plan as the system is adapted for use
by workers of
Dossia-member companies, who also include British Petroleum, Pitney Bowes, Cardinal Health,Applied Materials, and the two
latest founding
members, AT&T and Sanofi-Aventis, who quietly joined the alliance several months ago, but publicly announced their participation
only
now.
Using PHRs for medical record keeping is only the tip of the iceberg.
The need to make day-to-day observations about mood, pain, etc. is consistent across all patient groups and lends itself to
common
approaches to record, store and analyze this data.
Successful PHRs and their applications need to mesh with the tools that consumers rely on in their everyday routines.
Medical identity theft remains problematic A list of policy recommendations that might reinforce – or require – more secure behavior among healthcare providers and
prevent medical identity theft. These include:
Forcing patient notification for all breaches that result in any inappropriate release of medical information;
Create financial incentives to help smaller organizations protect data and notify patients of breaches, while stiffening penalties
for
providers who fail to do so;
Enforce existing laws and conduct more compliance audits;
Require vendors to prove appropriate privacy and security controls before they are eligible to participate in federal or state
contracting;
Create a nationwide body similar to existing credit bureaus to assist patients after a medical identity theft. Such an organization
would
help to correct medical records affected by a theft.
eHealth Vulnerability Reporting Program Founded in May, 2006, the
eHealth Vulnerability
Reporting Program (eHVRP) is a collaborative of health care industry organizations, technology companies and security professionals.
eHVRP’s mandate is to establish approaches and procedures that will help ensure eHealth systems are broadly and rapidly deployed
with
the highest levels of privacy and security.
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Oct 1, 2007 : Vol.10 No.19
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