HIPAA/SECURE: Security Q/A
10th Hour HIPAA Security
by William Miaoulis, CISA, CISM, Principal, Phoenix Health Systems

By Josef Spencer, Director, Phoenix Health Systems &
Mary Lynn Bushman, Project Coordinator, Empire Medicare Services
Updated March 2006

Most of the healthcare community understands that October 16, 2003 marked the deadline for complying with the HIPAA Transactions and Code Sets (TCS) Rule. Iit is important to recognize that transitioning to the transactions standards named in this Rule was only the beginning of mandated healthcare transaction “administrative simplification” in the United States. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued the Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) for the Claims Attachment transaction in 2005. The NPRM names six required claims attachment types: Ambulance Services, Emergency Department, Rehabilitation Services, Clinical Reports, Laboratory Results, and Medications. Once the industry has filed its comments, HHS will publish a final rule, after which the industry will have 26 months to implement the new standard.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) X12N and Health Level 7 (HL7) Standards Organizations worked together to develop an electronic standard for claims attachments to recommend to HHS. The ANSI X12N Healthcare Claim Request for Additional Information (277), the ANSI X12 Additional Information to Support a Healthcare Claim or Encounter (275), and the HL7 Clinical Architecture Document (CDA) were included in the recommendation.

Apr 19, 2007 - Princeton, N.J.
Local and regional market variations highlighted

There are “vast differences” in the way local and regional health care markets use information technology, publicly reported performance measurements and other key initiatives that experts believe could drive improvements in the quality of health care for people with chronic illnesses, according to a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the Center for Health Improvement (CHI). These findings underscore the need to account for community variations in any national attempt to improve health care quality, the study concludes.

The researchers studied the following seven likely important attributes of 14 selected communities based on recommendations by the Institute of Medicine and independent experts: (1) community leadership, (2) ability to support efforts by health care providers to improve quality, (3) measurement of performance outcomes, (4) public reporting of performance measurements, (5) attempts to align provider financial incentives with improvement, (6) health information technology infrastructure, and (7) efforts to engage consumers in health care quality problems.

April 20, 2007

Scorecards that evaluate hospitals are “crucial” to “creating the competitive ‘race to the top’ that health reformers have dreamed of for decades,” according to a column by Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post. Such rankings are “part of the movement toward consumer-driven health care” and are important in improving the quality and affordability of health care, according to Pearlstein.

Much of the information is available online, which allows consumers to search for specific data. However, in the “baffling new world of hospital scorecards,” a hospital might earn a high ranking according to one set of measures but perform poorly on another, Pearlstein writes.

(More good reports are available as links in the same page)

April 24, 2007 | Monday, the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) announced it has revamped both its criteria development model and committee structure in an effort to set the stage for testing of a broader range of electronic health products.