EMR Update 7 – HIPAA, HITECH, and Protecting Your Patients’ Information This Issue: What is data-at-rest vs data-in-motion? What do the new HITECH Act provisions mean to your medical practice? What are potential penalties for violating the HIPAA regulations? What proactive measures can you take to protect yourself and your practice?
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced today a proposed outline for Meaningful Use criteria, in accordance with EMR implementation provisions under the Health Information Technology for Clinical and Economic Health (HITECH) Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. These specify some of the guidelines by which physicians […]
One of my partners asked if our practice could use free GMail instead of replacing our old and failing mail server (not free) and having to purchase the licensing for the Microsoft software (definitely not free). When I looked into it, it turned out to be a bit more complicated than just deciding between a […]
Much of the new regulatory information coming out of Washington is getting increasingly more difficult to translate into English. I was recently asked whether a medical practice could use Google’s free email service GMail instead of spending money on a mail server and its associated server software. After checking with our own head of IT, […]
Most medical offices today are using an electronic practice management (EPM) system. This software is a far cry from its paper-based ancestors, the appointment and ledger books. The EPM market has expanded over the last twenty or so years to include a variety of products on several platforms. And increasingly we are witnessing the digital […]
Now that medical practices are joining the rest of the computerized world, they are having to deal such issues as office network security policies. As in most companies with a computer network, the weakest link is usually an employee who either inadvertently, or wittingly, commits one of these mistakes: Trusting outsiders too much – security […]
Microsoft’s HealthVault hopes to bring EMRs to consumersYou can always tell when a particular industry is getting hot: when big tech players start jockeying for position. Microsoft, AOL, and Google are all announcing different electronic medical records initiatives. Microsoft has unveiled what it calls HealthVault , a sort of personal filing cabinet for storing important […]
