SRA to Manage 2 Health-Care Data Banks for HHS
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SRA International of Fairfax won a $68.6 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department to manage two data banks that collect information on medical and dental malpractice, improper payments and licensing issues.
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Latest licensing deal signals a move into the health-care arena.
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Digital patient records could become building blocks in a nationwide biomedical computer network for assembling and distributing up-to-the-minute studies of disease.
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(Source: AT&T)  The federal government has awarded more than $139 million to help healthcare providers move medical records more easily within a geographic region. The hope is that Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIO) will be the building blocks of a National Health Information Network.
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Doctors who prescribe the drug and its generic equivalents, patients who take it and pharmacists who dispense it now will be registered in a central database.
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The U.S. Congress needs to pass healthcare IT legislation before private companies develop multiple systems that don&#39;t talk to each other, two advocacy groups said Tuesday.Members of the Health IT Now Coalition and the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) urged Congress to move ahead with health IT legislation such as the Promoting Health Information Technology Act. The bill would establish a public/private group to recommend health IT standards and certification and would budget $163 million a year for health-care providers to adopt health IT products, such as electronic health records.Health technologies can help improve healthcare quality, reduce costs and encourage changes in treatment, said former U.S. Representative Nancy Johnson, co-chairwoman of the Health IT Now Coalition.Health IT is &quot;going to produce radical change,&quot; Johnson said at a news conference. &quot;It&#39;s going to radically improve the quality of health care that Americans receive.&quot;With health-care costs continuing to climb, moving to an electronic system that reduces paper and medical errors is the best hope to extend health care to U.S. residents who are uninsured, she added. &quot;It is the only way that we guarantee to Americans of every age that our health-care system will continue to deliver the state-of-the-art medicine for which it has been known worldwide,&quot; Johnson said.The Promoting Health Information Technology Act has stalled in the House of Representatives and a similar piece of legislation, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act, has stalled in the Senate.Some groups, including Patient Privacy Rights, have raised concerns that the legislation doesn&#39;t adequately address patient privacy issues. &quot;The Senate Wired Act has no privacy protections or language ensuring patient control of health records,&quot; the group said on its Web site. &quot;It must not pass unless patients have the right to keep their health records private.&quot;Privacy and security must be major components of a health IT bill, Johnson said at the news conference. But she and Rhett Dawson, ITI&#39;s president and CEO, said Congress should pass a health IT bill before vendors develop multiple systems that don&#39;t interoperate. &quot;The public interest is in interoperability,&quot; Johnson said.A health IT bill would be a major accomplishment that lawmakers could show to voters before the November elections, Dawson said. &quot;We believe the time to act is now,&quot; he added.In addition to the news conference, a group of IT vendors, including Lexmark, NetApp and NCR, demonstrated health technologies at a congressional office building on Tuesday.EMC&#39;s RSA division demonstrated secure Web sign-on technologies that patients and health-care providers can use. RSA&#39;s Secure Web Access for Patient and Provider Portals allows administrators to set access rights based on who&#39;s signing in, said Seth Geftic, RSA product marketing manger. For example, a doctor could have access to more patient records than a nurse or an insurance provider, he said.In addition, RSA provides authentication technologies that can be used to recognize users when they first sign in. For example, the RSA Adaptive Authentication can use publicly available information, such as height, car loans and old addresses, to authenticate a user entering a health IT Web site for the first time, Geftic said.&quot;You don&#39;t even have to enter the last four digits of your Social Security number,&quot; added Shannon Kellogg, director of information security policy in EMC&#39;s office of government relations.
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More than 98 percent of US hospitals are now reporting quality-of-care data for treating heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid said on Thursday.
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Health industry, tech firms, government agencies might collaborate to build a secure database of patient records.
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Donna Wilde has spent more than 35 years in the health-care industry without ever touching blood, body parts or a hospital bed. As a health-information manager, she can help doctors find better ways to treat patients or track a person&#39;s medical history.
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(InfoWorld) - Computerization of health care record keeping remains both a need and a challenge, said IT and health care dignitaries at an IBM-sponsored conference in San Jose, Calif. on Monday. IBM's New Paradigms for Using Computers 2007 workshop focused on health care interfaces. Previous years' workshops have covered such topics as Web 2.0 and mobile computing. "Health care is moving in the direction of computerization, but there's so many difficult issues in the user interface in particular that have not been addressed," said John Barton, manager of Interaction Science at IBM. Right now, health care is plagued by bad interfaces, said Paul Tang, vice president and chief medical officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif. "It's really driving under the influence of terrible interfaces," he said. Tang cited studies that estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year in the United States resulting from medical mismanagement in hospitals. Patient safety would be enhanced by having better information available, he stressed. Information is fragmented. "There's almost no way a single individual could put this stuff together," but health depends on it, he said. Rather than just throwing computers at what are now paper processes, ethnography would help in figuring out what information is needed, said Tang.Â  At Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a Web site, PAMFOnline, provides patients and health care persons access to the same records. Patients can enter information and access data like test results. But patients can only add to personal, not official, health records, Tang said. About 45 percent of the foundation's patients are signed up. Should they choose, patients can pay $60 year to send messages to their doctors via the site, said Tang. He said he did not expect to ever see a centralized national health record database because of public concerns over privacy and security. "To put all information into one database just puts too much at risk," Tang said when interviewed after his presentation. Introduction of electronic health records is a nice way to make doctors and nurses more efficient, but it takes more time to use a computer than paper, said speaker Jakob Bardram, a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen who has been involved in health care. Paper records will not go away, he said. It is easier, however, to retrieve information on computers than on paper, Bardram said. Hospital persons need to be able to move about the building and enter information on different systems rather than being consigned to a single terminal for data entry, he said. PDAs, for their part, are not much of a solution because they do not have batteries that will have last a full seven-hour shift, said Bardram. "I think [PDAs] have a hard time in hospitals," Bardram said. But PDAs are being used in hospitals, he said. He urged development of middleware or operating systems that support mobility in hospitals and extend to health care workers' homes. Through a concept dubbed "Activity Roaming," health care workers could move between different computers and systems. A middleware platform has been developed for this, but it has not been deployed yet, said Bardram. IBM efforts in health care have included work on standards such as HL7 (Health Level 7) as well as participation in the Nationwide Health Information Network. The company is seeking to connect islands of information, such as patients, clinics, and hospitals. Also the event, Barbara Bennett, a health care business and transactional lawyer, said the IT industry has no clue what it means to delve into health care because health care is heavily regulated and IT has had little of this "It's overwhelming" to people used to a business has been essentially unregulated, Bennett said. She listed key legal risks to watch for in developing products for health care: * Privacy and security, including overlapping federal and state laws. * FDA regulations that govern how medical devices, including software, can packaged, labeled, marketed, and sold. * Medicare reimbursement, in which products must be reimbursable if they are to be sold. * Fraud and abuse, in which influencing patient or physician choices can be seen as an attempt to steer health care product referrals. This factor can affect a product design and sales strategy. * Malpractice. Technology can be seen by users as potentially causing mistakes rather than preventing them.
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HERNDON, Va., March 2  /PRNewswire/ -- The federal government's American Health Information Community is providing funds and encouraging private industry to participate in the government's increasing use of electronic records and systems for the creation, storage and sharing of health information.
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When the asset-tracking project goes live on Oct. 1, the hospital expects to be able to better track patients, clinicians and critical equipment.
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Five major companies have joined forces and invested in what appears to be the ultimate personal medical-records database.
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Congress urged to require standards in health care databases so private firms can exchange information as needed.
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National Committee for Quality Assurance&#39;s annual State of Health Care Quality report is the culmination of a year&#39;s worth of measurement and data collection, the goal of which is to help drive improvement by providing as complete a view of health care
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The UK&#39;s National Health Service (NHS) has signed a software licensing deal with Microsoft Corp. that the NHS says will provide for the development of a user interface specifically designed for the organization
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IBM on Monday will unveil software it developed in coordination with U.S. health agencies and private hospitals that makes it easier for health care workers to exchange clinical data in a medical crisis.