Seeing promise and peril in digital records
The New York Times
The matter of technical standards for electronic health records is raising concerns, prompting heated debate in recent meetings of representatives from medicine, industry, academia and government. The stakes, they say, could scarcely be higher. They agree that, when well designed and wisely used, digital records can deliver the power of better information to medicine, improving care and curbing costs. But computer forms, they add, can also be difficult to use, cluttered and distracting, causing more harm than good in health care. More

Mayo Clinic builds next-generation HIE
InformationWeek
Using a Beacon grant provided by the ONC, the Mayo Clinic is building what may be the next generation of health information exchanges with a group of health care providers in southeast Minnesota. In this real-world demonstration, Mayo will apply the computer tools it is developing through a federal SHARP grant to create new methods of mining EHR data.More

IOM recommends mandatory coverage for contraception
The Hill
A panel of health care experts said that the federal government should require insurance plans to offer coverage for contraception without co-pays. The health care reform law requires plans to cover certain preventive care without charging a co-pay. An Institute of Medicine committee issued a highly anticipated report that recommends eliminating co-pays for eight categories of women's health services, including contraception. More

National health IT coordinator endorses 'meaningful use' delay
InformationWeek
National health IT coordinator Dr. Farzad Mostashari has endorsed a plan to delay the start of stage 2 of the federal incentive program for meaningful use of electronic health records. Speaking by telephone to an Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems meeting, Mostashari said he supports the recommendation of the Health IT Policy Committee, a federally chartered advisory panel, to give health care providers until 2014 to comply with the second round of standards in the $27 billion program.More

ICD-9 vs. ICD-10: Learning the differences
Advance
During the development of the ICD-10 Procedure Coding System, significant changes were made that affect the format of procedure coding and how coders will look up codes in the index and tables for code assignment. This article will present the differences. More

FDA plans oversight of some mobile medical apps
Reuters
A fast-growing number of software applications offers doctors the chance to view X-rays or monitor heart rates from iPads or smartphones, prompting U.S. health officials to propose government oversight for some of the more complex health apps. A portion of the apps perform tasks that mimic the work of medical devices and could cause harm if they failed to perform as promised, Food and Drug Administration officials said.More

Poll: America's 20 Most Beautiful Hospitals
Healthcare Finance News
Bon Secours St. Francis Medical Center of Midlothian, Va., has been named America's Most Beautiful Hospital by a poll of Soliant.com visitors. Soliant Health, an Adecco Group company, is a leading provider of specialized health care staffing services to hospitals and health care providers. In its third year of the contest, the company has turned the top 20 picks over to America.More

A better personal health record?
Technology Review
When Google recently announced it would discontinue Google Health at the end of this year, it left the fate of personal health records hanging. Unlike medical records kept by health care providers, Google Health offered a single place where people could store, analyze and share their personal health information. But it was hampered by a fragmented health system that made it difficult to collect medical information, and it relied on the initiative of consumers to gather their own data.More

HIEs increase but sustainability still elusive
HealthData Management
An annual survey of health information exchanges has identified 255 such initiatives in 2011, up 9 percent from 234 a year ago. But only 24, or about 9.6 percent, of such initiatives report having sustainable business models, which is a slight improvement over the 7.6 percent reporting sustainability in 2010. Further, many of the HIEs are concentrated with 43 percent in just 10 states.More

8 tactics for mobile data privacy and security
Government Health IT
With the sweeping use of mobile devices by health care providers, physicians and hospitals need to embrace best practices for protecting sensitive patient data, privacy experts say. For example, encrypt sensitive data when it is necessary to store on wireless devices. Many of the current 10,000 mobile health care applications were designed to enable their users to access to EHRs. At the same time, in the past two years, the Office of Civil Rights has reported that 116 data breaches of 500 records or more were the direct result of the loss or theft of a mobile device and led to the exposure of the personal health information of 1.9 million patients.More