March 2011

This week’s edition of Health Wonk Review is at the Healthcare Economist

Jason Shafrin is our host for this week’s edition of Opening Day Edition of Health Wonk Review at the Healthcare Economist. It’ a concise compendium of the best of the health IT and health policy blogs over the last two weeks. Check it out! Share this:EmailFacebookLinkedInSharePrintStumbleUponRedditDigg

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Join me for a free webinar on “Understanding the Escalating Data Challenges of Meaningful Use” on Thursday, April 7th

I’ve been doing a good deal of coaching and consulting on what Meaningful Use really means to technology professionals lately so I was pleased to accept an invitation by Informatica to lead a webinar on that subject for a data management audience. Data management professionals and the executives that they report to have now had enough [...]

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WSJ: Google Health might get less support under new CEO

Interesting news this morning from the Wall Street Journal: Some managers believe Mr. Page will eliminate or downgrade projects he doesn’t believe are worthwhile, freeing up employees to work on more important initiatives, these people said. One project expected to get less support is Google Health, which lets people store medical records and other health [...]

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Speakers needed for Business Intelligence & Analytics for Healthcare Conference & Exhibition (July 11-12 in San Diego)

The Center for Business Innovation (TCBI), run by my friend Satish Kavirajan, is currently organizing the Business Intelligence & Analytics for Healthcare Conference & Exhibition: Managing Data to Drive Quality, Financial Performance & Accountable Care, to be held in San Diego on July 11-12, 2011. I’m an advisor for the conference, will be speaking on several [...]

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Guest Article: Safe usage of social networking is a good prescription for patients

Patricia Walling, a graduate student who has both professional and volunteer experience in a hospital environment, reached out to me via e-mail recently about some of her ideas of how physicians can communicate with their patients through social networking. I liked her ideas and invited her to put together an guest posting on the subject. [...]

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Waiting until 2012 on attestation for Meaningful Use doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy an EHR in 2011

In my previous posting I wrote “You will be better off waiting until FY 2012 on Meaningful Use.” I received a bunch of questions via e-mail about that so I thought I would clarify my recommendations. I agree, based on Protima Advani’s evidence cited at iHealthBeat, that waiting until 2012 for attestation (registration, etc.) for [...]

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You will be better off waiting until FY 2012 on Meaningful Use

Anthony Guerra pointed me to an article by Protima Advani at iHealthBeat which contains some very important advice about whether you should consider attesting to Meaningful Use (MU) and go for incentive money in 2011 or 2012. Here is what Protima writes (bold, emphasis mine). The registration process and reporting period for the meaningful use [...]

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SMART: A Facebook-like platform for medical apps

Today, Wil Yu (Special Assistant, Innovations) over at ONC wrote about a new innovation challenge that is giving out money to developers who can create micro apps that run in the new SMART architecture containers. If you’re not familiar with SMART and want a technical introduction, head over to the SMART Wiki; if you just [...]

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HIPAA and HITECH security starts with secure operating systems, proxies, and databases (Sudo 1.8)

I spend a lot of time talking with CEOs, CIOs, and other senior executives about what HIPAA security and HITECH privacy policies really mean. I hear a lot of naive talk about how systems are secure because “we use SSL encryption” or “we’re secure because we have a firewall”. Anybody who’s been security and privacy [...]

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What human capital does it take to develop healthcare IT and EHR apps?

With tons of money coming into the healthcare IT ecosystem, it’s become vogue to build healthcare IT and EHR applications. When an engineer new to healthcare looks at a typical health application they think they can throw something quickly and sometimes bad advice is being given to business people who are budgeting for new projects. [...]

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