Online Health Records Urged
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Health care advocates say government support of electronic data can improve care and prevent errors.
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A trio of ugly situations mean hard times for healthcare organizations too lazy or sloppy to get right with HIPAA requirements. Columnist Jon Espenschied has a secret for making sure you're not next.
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(InfoWorld) - Two large health insurance trade groups based in the U.S. have released a model for personal health records, a portable, Web-based tool that includes a customer's insurance claims, immunization records, medication records and other health information. America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, whose members provide health insurance to about two thirds of U.S. residents, unveiled the personal health record model Wednesday. The two groups saw the importance of working together on the project, said Susan Pisano, vice president of communications for AHIP. "This is really an effort that cries out for collaboration," she said. U.S. President George Bush has pushed for electronic health records to be available to all U.S. residents by 2014. Backers of such records say they will improve the efficiency of the U.S. health-care system and cut down on errors such as drug interaction problems. Personal health records, or PHRs, "may be one of our most important contributions to helping improve health care," Ronald Williams chairman, chief executive and president of insurer Aetna Inc., said in a statement. PHRs are similar to other electronic health records, although they include less specific treatment information. Electronic health records typically are used by health-care providers to store and manage detailed clinical information. Patients will be able to enter information into their PHRs, in addition to information from pharmacies, laboratories and medical providers, the groups said. The model released Wednesday includes definitions of data elements that should be included in PHRs, such as risk factors, family history, health-care facilities and medications taken. The model also includes standards for the PHRs to be portable between insurers and providers, and rules about when insurers can share the information. Insurers can send the information to a new insurer only after the patient gives consent and has enrolled in the new insurance plan, Pisano said. Those tight sharing rules were designed to address concerns about the PHRs used by insurance underwriters, she said. The PHR model also set 2008 as the deadline for insurers to incorporate the data elements and adopt the portability standards, she added. The groups said the U.S. is still "many years" away from a fully interoperable health records system. But Dr. Robert Kolodner, interim national coordinator for health information technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, praised the groups' efforts. The new model is a "step forward in the national health IT agenda," he said in a statement. Earlier this month, five major corporations -- Applied Materials Inc., British Petroleum America Inc., Intel Corp., Pitney Bowes Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. -- announced plans to fund the development of a Web-based system that would allow their employees and retirees to access and maintain personal medical records. The companies said the plan could help them cut health-care costs.
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NEW YORK, Feb. 28  /PRNewswire/ -- A new study is showing a large shift in the number of Americans going online to help manage their health.  But the Illuminas Study, sponsored by Cisco Systems, also says doctors aren't taking enough advantage of the Internet.
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I overheard a long-time hospital client talking to another support vendor today. The hospitalâs patient accounting department was attempting to send patient financial and billing data to a third-party biller. The vendorâs normal Web site was down, and they were trying to come up with an emergency fix.
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The U.S. needs new medical privacy rules as the country moves toward greater use of IT to store health records, a group of health-care experts said Wednesday.
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Itâs news that will have health obsessives breaking out in a sweat: browsing medical websites can be bad for you, a new study claimed today.
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The first patients' electronic records are uploaded to the NHS online database, part of a Â£12bn IT project.
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WEDNESDAY, Dec. 22 (HealthDay News) -- Although it has been a long time coming, physicians are beginning to consider the Internet an integral part of their practice.
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Before me lies the patient, a Gateway computer running Windows 98. It is suffering from extremely clogged Internet arteries, unable to reach the Web. As one of The Washington Post's digital doctors, my task is to nurse the machine back to health so my colleague Kathleen Day can access her e-mail and file stories from home.
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An improved ability to share medical records electronically via IT systems is still many years away, according to health care industry officials who testified at a U.S. House hearing.
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Doctors need guidance on how to avoid problems using technology to reach patients, says a researcher.
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Microsoft launched a free, ad-supported online health portal called HealthVault yesterday that allows people to upload their medical records to the Web and share the information with doctors.
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Most online pharmacies are unlicensed and may be putting patients health at risk, research suggests.
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People searching for online health advice prefer sites with "a human touch", a study suggests.
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A local firm&#39;s technology is behind a new Internet-based early-warning system that could help detect health threats to the global population.
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Medical records are frequently  incomplete or missing during patient visits to the doctor,  posing potential danger and wasting time, a survey of  physicians said on Tuesday.