News

But privacy experts said it shouldnt be up to IQVIA, or any other for-profit company, to decide how patients personal information is used. Who are you to decide what benefits these people? Yasnoff said. What gives you the right to be judge, jury, and executioner?To Yasnoff, the common comparison of medical data to oil a commodity to be freely traded entirely misunderstands the unique nature of data. Oil gets burned and cant be reused, but information can be reused, and so is very valuable, he said. The way we need to deal with personal information is to look at it as an extension of the person.

This market in medical records has become highly lucrative $13.5 billion annually thanks to advances in artificial intelligence that enable the slicing, dicing, and cross-referencing of that data in powerful new ways.

The initiative will include a 5-step checklist to increase patient education about health data sharing, helping patients protect their health information while using third-party apps.

On April 27, 2004, President Bush signed Executive Order (EO) 13335 and created the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). Like tapping that first domino, this single action is a key moment in United States health IT history. Nearly two decades later, US policy and technology leadership in health IT is world-renowned. Throughout this time, ONC has remained true to the four original duties cast by EO 13335 (paraphrased): serve as the Secretarys principal advisor on the development,

At the virtual ONC annual meeting on April 13, Tripathi noted that over the last decade, the agency has established an electronic overlay of the healthcare system to move away from the constraints of paper, brick, and mortar.“Now, the exciting part is that we get to think about how we want to redesign our healthcare system without the constraints of paper, brick, and mortar,” Tripathi explained. “Our work in health IT is ultimately to create open architectures, both from a policy and a technical perspective, that allow for that reconceptualization of our healthcare system to happen.”

You have heard the mantra about searching for value in healthcare. There have been dozens, hundreds, or thousands of federal policies depending on how you parse the Federal Register and entire organizations such as AHRQ, MedPAC and the CMS Center for Clinical Standards and Quality dedicated to this one goal. Why has finding value been so elusive? To a large extent, our struggle to find value dates back to 1942 when, after the Roosevelt administration froze wage hikes to forestall inflation during World War II, employers turned to healthcare benefits as a major recruiting tool. The subsequent growth of employer-sponsored insurance limited the impact individual consumers could have on the market. Today, we are seeing advances in computing transform the calculus of consumer choice in almost every industry telecom, retail, travel, entertainment, banking, publishing but healthcare still lags. Much of the value measurement space represented by tools such as quality measures and prior authorization have been attempts to provide proxies for value to consumers / patients to fill the void in choosing what to pay for in healthcare.

he HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced four HIPAA enforcement actions to hold healthcare providers accountable for potential HIPAA violations. Two of the actions stemmed from OCRs HIPAA Right of Access Initiative, bringing the total number ofenforcement actions to 27 since the initiative began in 2019.Between the rising pace of breaches of unsecured protected health information and continued cyber security threats impacting the health care industry, it is critical that covered entities take their HIPAA compliance responsibilities seriously, Lisa J. Pino, OCRs director, stated in the announcement.OCR will continue our steadfast commitment to protect individuals health information privacy and security through enforcement, and we will pursue civil money penalties for violations that are not addressed.

What is the HITAC?The Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) was established in the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) and is governed by the provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) which sets forth standards for the formation and use of federal advisory committees.

The proliferation of synthetic data in artificial intelligence for medicine and healthcare raises concerns about the vulnerabilities of the software and the challenges of current policy.

The HIPAA Privacy Rule and Electronic Health Information Exchange in a Networked Environment