New York Governor Announces $52M in Health IT Grants

New York Gov. George Pataki (R) on Tuesday announced that more than $52.8 million in grants will be awarded to advance health IT efforts on a regional level, Government Technology reports.

New York Governor George E. Pataki today announced the availability of $52,875,000 in grant funding to advance Health Information Technology (HIT) initiatives on a regional level. Under the terms of a five year agreement negotiated by Pataki with the federal Department of Health and Human Services, additional federal funding will be made available to supplement the State funds announced by the governor today. Up to half of the grant funds awarded, $26.4 million, under HEAL Phase 3 will be supported by F-SHRP, if the grant recipients meet the qualifications.

The funding announced today is part of the state’s Healthcare Efficiency and Affordability Law for New Yorkers (HEAL NY). The funding will be available to those health care facilities that work together with other providers in their community to create information technology for sharing clinic data among health care providers. These awards will range from a minimum of $100,000 up to a maximum of $5 million.

“My administration is committed to supporting advancement of health care initiatives that promote the delivery of high quality health care to all New Yorkers,” Pataki said. “This funding will help improve the quality and efficiency of the delivery of health care in New York State by supporting investments in interoperable information technology such as electronic health records. We urge health care providers across the state to apply for HEAL NY funding.”

Full article at Government Technolgy

Initiative To Make PHRs Interoperable, Portable Among Insurers

By Diana Manos, Senior Editor Healthcare IT News

WASHINGTON – America’s Health Insurance Plans is poised to announce an industry initiative for making personal health records portable from one health insurance company to another.

AHIP will make public the details of an 18-month pilot project with 10 AHIP member companies on December 13. The panel studied ways health insurance companies could assist in making PHRs interoperable. The plan will also recommend minimum elements for all PHRs.

AHIP represents nearly 1,300 member companies providing health insurance coverage to more than 200 million Americans.

“Many of our member companies have already set up PHRs,” said Susan Pisano, AHIP’s vice president of communications. “The main roadblock has been that if a patient left one company and went to another, their records weren’t portable and interoperability was lacking.”

Health insurance companies for the most part have no standard for what PHRs should include, Pisano said. AHIP’s goal has been to identify the essential elements needed in PHRs.

“Companies will still compete on bells and whistles, as they always do, but the focus of the project is core elements,” Pisano said.

The project is part of a partnership with the National Health Council, which shares AHIP’s interest in having PHRs available, portable and usable by consumers, Pisano said.

“Widespread use of [electronic] PHRs can greatly empower the 100 million Americans with chronic disease and allow them to take better control of their health care. Yet only a small segment of the population even knows they exist,” said National Health Council President Myrl Weinberg. ” By working with our members, the voluntary health community, and AHIP we can credibly educate Americans about this resource and encourage its widespread use.”

AHIP has been in consult with IT standards organization, including the American National Standards Institute, “to make sure they know what we’re doing and where we’re headed,” Pisano said. “Our idea is that our work should mesh with whatever ultimately is accomplished in making the whole healthcare system interoperable.”

AHIP anticipates its PHR initiative to be a first step toward use of electronic health information to monitor chronic care patients–representing nearly half of all Americans with healthcare issues–and should present a cost savings, Pisano said.

The plan supports the Nationwide Health Information Network, the government-led project to connect all regional health IT networks into one large interconnected system.

“We want to approach PHR interoperability in a way that’s compatible with the national effort and we feel we’re in a position to make that contribution,” Pisano said.

AHIP is starting with PHRs rather than EHRs because much of the data needed to establish PHRs already is available within health insurance company databases. “We have the information, and consumers and doctors should have it too. This seems like a logical place to start,” Pisano said.

See article at Healthcare IT News

Privacy panel explores identity proofing

By: Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer

A federal policy advisory panel on privacy and security of electronic healthcare information spent a second consecutive session wrestling with the details of how to best identify patients, providers and others who might want access to patient data from electronic medical-records systems, personal health records and messaging systems.

The confidentiality, privacy and security work group of the American Health Information Community met for three hours via teleconference Monday, working mainly on honing a list of draft recommendations for “identity proofing,” ways of verifying a person’s identity before giving access to electronic records systems or messages. Read more on the draft recommendations.

Group members decided to focus their recommendations not on broad privacy policies but on the narrow demands of three other AHIC work groups. Those work groups are: looking to promote the use of electronic health-records systems by making it easier to import laboratory values into the systems; developing technologies to create medication histories and electronically provide basic patient registration information to electronic personal health records; aiming to accelerate the electronic transfer of anonymized patient data from ambulatory care and hospital emergency room environments to public health authorities.

Even so, the privacy work group tentatively approved the wording of some general statements — that all data exchanged through an EHR, PHR or messaging systems it sensitive, and that the work group’s identity-proofing recommendations were not intended to be a comprehensive list, but a set of guiding principles.

The group also reached a consensus on some specific recommendations, including: the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology should incorporate criteria for identity proofing in its testing program for electronic healthcare information systems; physicians converting paper records to electronic in their own practices need not be required to identity-proof those records, but should use identity proofing techniques when moving that information electronically to patients from their EHRs; and that anyone moving patient information from a PHR to a patient should use the recommended identity-proofing techniques.

The group stuck, however, on specific identity-proofing techniques and their applicability to different providers. Generally speaking, the group reached consensus on the notion that when a face-to-face, personal relationship exists between a patient and a provider, identity proofing of medical records in person is the gold standard. But they hung up on the adequacy of identity proofing when there were lesser levels of a relationship between the recordkeeper and the person whose records were being kept, with much discussion centering on PHR systems being offered by insurance companies and other third-party payers.

The group put off deciding on a hierarchy of recommended lesser identity proofing techniques until a later meeting. 

Read entire article at Modern Healthcare

Military Health System loses nearly 5,000 records

BY Bob Brewin
Published on Nov. 14, 2006

The Military Health System (MHS) lost records of almost 5,000 patient encounters because of hardware and software problems with portions of the Defense Department’s Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application (AHLTA) electronic health record system, a top MHS official told Federal Computer Week.

The system is also experiencing backup problems with data stored locally at military treatment facilities (MTFs), which a Defense Information Systems Agency official described as anomalies but not systemic. DISA maintains the MHS network and provides mainframe storage at one of its data centers and local storage at MTFs.

Robert Foster, director of MHS’ Joint Program Executive Office, said the software problems occurred after local cache servers (LCS) were installed at 101 facilities and Northrop Grumman provided a new AHLTA software patch.

The patch, designed to improve LCS performance, was successfully installed at 99 MTFs, but did not work at Fort Stewart, Ga., and Fort Drum, N.Y., when it was installed in August, Foster said.

A database flag or trigger was incorrectly set at those two locations, Foster said. Consequently, clinical encounters between doctors and patients were not captured and stored because the system viewed each as an inactive patient, he said.

As a result, 2,608 encounters were not captured at Fort Drum and another 978 at Fort Stewart. MHS has resolved the patch problems at those two locations, Foster said.

A hardware problem at Fort Hood, Texas, in September resulted in the loss of information from 1,400 clinical encounters, Foster said. That loss was because of a hardware failure in a Redundant Array of Independent Disks when a Hewlett-Packard technician installed a new piece of equipment and inadvertently erased all the data on the disk by setting it to factor default, Foster said. No backup was in place.

Foster said some of the information erased at Fort Hood is stored in other MHS databases, and the system is working with clinicians to help them rebuild their records. The amount of clinical encounter information lost because of the hardware and software problems pales in comparison to the overall scale of AHLTA, which contains the records of 8.6 million active-duty and retired military personnel and their families, he added.

Alfred Rivera, DISA director for computing services, said MHS experiences local backup failures at two or three sites nightly and it is investigating the cause of the failures, which he viewed as “one-offs” and not systemic.

They include bad tapes in a backup system or the failure to insert a tape, Rivera said. DISA monitors whether backups have been performed locally, and if not, alerts the MTF to perform a backup either in during the night or the next day.

Backup is essential, Foster said, because AHLTA is an electronic system and “as general rules, we don’t do paper backups.” The LCS, which MHS started to use in February, provides redundancy to the AHLTA Clinical Data Repository housed at a DISA data center, he said. The repository is mirrored at that data center and at a remote center, Rivera said.

MHS’ disclosure of its data loss follows DISA’s acknowledgement earlier this month that the repository experienced a 20-minute failure in late October. Last week DISA dispatched its vice director, Army Maj. Gen. Marilyn Quagliotti, to the data center that houses the repository to conduct a review of that outage, an agency spokesman said.

The purpose of Quagliotti’s visit was to examine AHLTA from technical, operational and organizational perspectives, and to determine if DISA needs to make improvements, the spokesman added.

Article: Government Health IT http://www.govhealthit.com/article96828-11-14-06-Web

Central Missouri Cardiology begins to offer patients portable electronic health records

Central Missouri Cardiology announced it will begin providing patients a new technology that allows them to carry their medical records with them at all times in their pocket, wallet or purse.

The technology, GEMMS MyRECORD (TM), is a credit card-sized compact disc that contains a patient’s current medical information and history pulled directly from their cardiologist’s medical record. The practice is the first medical group in Missouri to offer this portable medical record technology to patients.

Medical errors are a leading cause of death. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that emergency room visits have hit a record high of nearly 114 million visits per year. Providing patients with access to their medical record at point of care will save lives and produce better outcomes. Policy makers from both political parties are pushing for health care reforms.

MyRECORD can be inserted into any computer and read by any web browser, anywhere in the world.

Healthcare providers can immediately see a patient’s medical history, active medications, current diagnosis and treatments, as well as review the patient’s most recent test results from the disc’s medical record information; thus supporting better and faster diagnoses and treatment decisions.

“Central Missouri Cardiology is pleased to break new ground in the community by offering our patients exclusive access to this technology,” said Dr. Randall Meyer.

The product’s cost is far less than traditional medical identification bracelets and the technology offers faster, more robust physician endorsed information at the point of care. Patients who request a portable health record will be charged $10.

Article here: http://newstribune.com/articles/2006/11/14/business/047bus10.txt