Hospital CIOs, or at least some of the best hospital CIOs, seem to get it. The others need to get on the ball, fast.
"If you don't have mobility in your strategy, then you don't have a strategy," Susan Heichert, senior VP and CIO at Allina Health System, a 10-hospital system based in Minneapolis, said at the 2012 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Las...
At the beginning of the month DocBookMD announced a $2.2 million seed round of funding from a handful of private investors from the healthcare industry. DocBookMD offers a HIPAA-compliant platform for doctors to exchange texts, photos, charts, x-rays and similar information.
About 6,500 physicians now use the app, according to a report over at MedCityNews.
While the company did not specifically...
The UK's National Health Service (NHS) Connecting for Health division recently published a guidance document for how healthcare providers in that country should and shouldn't be using tablet devices. The document is chock-full of warnings about tablet use in healthcare settings, but it also includes some helpful hints for how CIOs should secure the devices.
The NHS states that tablet devices are...
Perhaps the best-known hospital CIO in the country loves the potential of mobile devices to improve care, but he cautions that healthcare organizations had better understand and act to mitigate the risks mobility can introduce.
Writing on the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality's Web M&M online journal, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of CareGroup Healthcare System in Boston, discusses his...
By Adam H. Greene, JD, MPH, former Senior Health Information Technology and Privacy Specialist at the HHS Office for Civil Rights, where he was responsible for applying the HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules to health IT, now a partner in the Health IT/HIPAA practice of Davis Wright Tremaine.
Once you have established that your mobile application is going to be subject to...
Lest anyone forget, the HITECH Act not only provides some $27 billion in financial incentives for healthcare providers to switch to electronic health records, it strengthens HIPAA privacy and security provisions and increases the penalties for violating HIPAA. This, according to one vendor, partially explains why some organizations have been slow to provide patients with mobile access to health...
Kindle for MDs: Sussing out whether the Amazon Kindle eBook reader is a good tool for physicians. Less distractions than an iPad? Meaningful Uses
Text4Baby Update: Text4Baby, a one-way, free text message service for new and expecting moms timed to their due date or baby’s date of birth is still picking up new subscribers across the US: 72,000 Text4Baby users to date and 3.5 million messages sent...
WiFi Infusion pumps for MA hospital: Milford Regional Medical Center (MRMC), a nonprofit, acute-care facility in Milford, Massachusetts, has deployed Aruba's HIPAA-compliant 802.11n Wi-Fi networks for telemetry monitoring, voice communications, and guest access. The network supports 150 wireless Baxter Sigma infusion pumps. Future apps include hospital-wide Spectralink and ASCOM voice...
UK-based publication, The Engineer, has a short and sweet commentary that raises the issue of privacy -- but not in the regulatory, protect-my-health-data sense. The brief editorial wonders where the line should be drawn for remote monitoring of older relatives and friends. The Engineer reported on A&D Medical's Bluetooth blood pressure cuff and Bluetooth-enabled weight scale attaining...
While it has yet to rule on whether PHRs should be covered under HIPAA, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has voted 4-0 and issued a final rule that requires certain "Web-based businesses" to alert consumers if there is a security breach of their electronic health information. If 500 or fewer consumers' health information is breached, then the health service provider must alert the consumers...
