Senate health committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) are urging insurer Anthem to notify all 78.8 million Americans whose sensitive personal information may have been exposed in a cyber attack discovered in January.
Lamar Alexander
In a letter to Anthem, the committee leaders note that more than a month and a half after a cyber attack identified on Jan. 29, 2015, “more than 50 million Americans … have yet to receive notice directly from Anthem” that their personal information, including addresses, birth dates, employer information, Social Security numbers and email addresses, may have been compromised, exposing them to resulting security threats like identity theft.”
The senators write, “…[T]he highly sensitive nature of this information makes early notification essential, and we are concerned with your slow pace of notification and outreach thus far. We are writing to formally request that you speed up the pace of notifications, and share with our committee what steps you plan to take in the next few days, to dramatically increase the pace of notification. This slow pace is of particular concern given that many of the individuals whose information has been compromised are not Anthem customers and may still be unaware that their information was contained in the attacked database.”
They continue, “We formally request that you provide a clear action plan that accelerates the current pace of notification and ensures that all affected families receive notification in the upcoming days. …This is a critical and pressing issue, and while we understand there are many complications given the size and scope of the attack, we look forward to your response by April 1, 2015 on your progress and a clear target for when you will have reached out to every affected individual.”
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), the professional organization for chief information officers and senior IT executives, is calling on innovators throughout the U.S. to participate in the CHIME National Patient ID Challenge.
In an effort to find a universal solution for accurately matching patients with their healthcare information, CHIME will launch a $1 million challenge early this summer on the HeroX platform, co-founded by XPRIZE CEO Dr. Peter Diamandis.
The digitization of the U.S. healthcare system maintains that electronic health records must be able to seamlessly share and exchange information. According to CHIME, interoperability is not enough — to realize their full potential, patient data contained in the EHR must be accurate to support the requirements of coordinated, accountable, patient-centered care, the organization says.
“There is a growing consensus among payers and providers that a unique patient ID would radically reduce medical errors and save lives,” said CHIME CEO and president Russell P. Branzell, FCHIME, CHCIO.”Incomplete or duplicate health records present significant issues in terms of patient safety, and there is a pressing need for preventing, detecting and removing inaccurate records so hospitals can positively match the right data with the right patient in order to provide the best possible care.”
Duplicate or inaccurate patient records can occur from manual data entry errors, or when two or more individuals share the same name. This presents considerable concern for different individuals being identified as the same patient, potentially resulting in inadequate treatment or unintended injury.
In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.
Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.
Elevator Pitch
PatientKeeper provides workflow applications for physicians that transform hospital EHRs from what they typically are – a distraction or hindrance topatient care – into what they should be: an intuitive support system for physicians.
About Statement
PatientKeeper, Inc. is a leading provider of healthcare applications for physicians. PatientKeeper’s highly intuitive software streamlines physician workflow to improve productivity and patient care. PatientKeeper’s CPOE, physician documentation, electronic charge capture and other applications run on desktop and laptop computers and popular handheld devices and tablets. PatientKeeper’s software integrates with many existing healthcare information systems to help provider organizations drive physician adoption of technology, meet Meaningful Use, and transition to ICD-10. More than 60,000 physicians across North America and the UK use PatientKeeper software.
Market Opportunity
PatientKeeper plays in two different market segments: (1) EHR optimization, and (2) revenue cycle optimization. In the former, we target 100+ bed community hospitals and hospital networks that rely primarily on affiliated physicians (vs. employed physicians) for patient admissions – clinicians whose loyalty (and business) must be “courted” and competed for – and which have not deployed or committed to an Epic EMR system. In the “Revenue Cycle Optimization” side of our business, we target physician practices of 25 doctors or more (but typically larger academic medical groups), and hospitals with a significant corps of employed physicians.
The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), a nonprofit authority on the use of health IT to create efficiencies in healthcare information exchange, released the findings from its recent survey on industry awareness and adoption regarding the usage of the “Blue Button” implementation guide for exporting patient healthcare records.
Devin Jopp
WEDI conducted its first survey on Blue Button in 2013, and as a follow up on the progress of industry adoption since that time, WEDI re-evaluated the industry in 2014. WEDI conducted the survey from Oct. 31, 2014 to Dec. 8, 2014, which included 274 respondents across multiple stakeholders, including providers, health plans, vendors and clearinghouses.
The full survey results can be viewed online and summarized through WEDI’s March 13 letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Some key observations WEDI notes from the 2014 survey in comparison to the 2013 findings include:
Relying on integrated electronic health record and medical device data to populate personal health records (PHRs) increased. While provider respondents remained relatively consistent in their use of integrated EHRs, a significant increase occurred for government respondents from 60 percent in 2013 to 100 percent in 2014.
Ensuring awareness of Blue Button as an industry-wide tool remains an opportunity.
Offering the PHR to all patients when implementing a PHR continues to be significant. There is a high percentage (80 percent in 2014) of respondents that are offering the PHR to all patients/members as opposed to only making it available to select subsets of their patients/members.
Enabling the patient/member to retain control over who has access to their PHR data through privacy controls continues to be important.
Transmitting data to patients, providers or authorized third parties appears to occur through DIRECT. Health plan and provider respondents both showed an increase in use of DIRECT for transmitting data, while government and technology developer respondents showed a decrease in use of DIRECT.
Providing patients with a better overall experience continues to show traditional communication methods as top priorities.
par8o is named after the 19th Century Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who first defined the powerful economic concept of “Pareto Optimization” in which a system is able to maximize benefits for each and every participant. When applied to the healthcare industry, Pareto Optimization holds the promise of being able to improve overall access to healthcare while lowering costs.
The par8o Healthcare Operating System allows healthcare organizations to optimize their networks of providers and other resources to deliver quality care by applying Pareto Optimization. This approach, and the technologies par8o has developed to implement it, are well-suited to the complex, multi-constituency nature of healthcare because they achieve continuous efficiency improvements while balancing the needs of all parties.
Simply put, par8o helps organizations match the right patient to the right resource at the right time.
Elevator pitch
Much like iOS or Android operating systems that tie together the user experience on your phone, par8o ties together payers, providers and patients to eliminate interoperability excuses to create a simple user experience.
Product/service description
par8o is a venture-backed, EHR-agnostic platform that creates a common point for coordinating care delivery and plan design, a technology that connects providers, payers, and patients. par8o is a cloud-based healthcare operating system enabling all parties to improve care and optimize towards several clinical and business goals in parallel rather than to the detriment of one another. par8o helps clients succeed by applying Pareto Optimization, a powerful economic principle that succeeds because it is well suited to the complex, multi-constituency nature of healthcare. Simply put, par8o helps organizations match the right patient to the right resource at the right time, ensuring that patients successfully transition to the next step in their care.
I continue to find the research and editorial produced by CDW insightful and easy to consume, and I remain a fan of the company’s work, though, honestly I don’t know as much as about them as I do other vendors. CDW is a provider of information technology solutions, including hardware and software, in the U.S. and Canada.
Editorially, other than producing an annual list of the top 50 healthcare blogs (which this site has been named the last two years) CDW operates a massive editorial arm, producing some fantastic publications, including BizTech, EdTech and FedTech, among others.
My point is that the organization knows a good deal about producing great content and editorial, and releasing interesting insights related to top of mind topics – this time healthcare wearables.
Though the following graphic (I’m also am a huge fan of infographics) may be a bit dated, I believe it paints an excellent picture of the current state of the healthcare wearables market and touches on the evolving trend of consumerism in healthcare. The popularity of wearables continues to skyrocket, despite much talk about the market being over saturated and the fact that the data produced by the likes of FitBit, for example, really is not that useful. That said, the wearables market saw and 684 percent increase growth in the first half of 2014 alone.
According to CSW, consumers are not the only fans of health and self-care wearable devices. Physicians, hospitals and insurance companies see the potential of wearables for managing chronic conditions, improving patient fitness and health and reducing healthcare costs.
But, there are still a few wrinkles to work out — data access, accuracy and privacy among them. The following infographic offers a bird’s-eye view into why this year’s wearable sales are expected to be just the tip of the iceberg.
In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.
Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.
Elevator Pitch
Curaspan offers effective and efficient solutions to help automate and standardize the care transition process, ultimately improving quality of care and financial outcomes through the use of care transition software.
About Statement
Curaspan is a provider of patient-transition solutions that help the top healthcare providers nationwide manage all aspects of transition planning. Its best-in-breed solutions automate transition of care workflows to create efficiencies and reduce process variation across networks of providers. With a secure platform for collaboration between providers and the analytics necessary to optimize performance, Curaspan’s solutions are the foundation for initiatives like ACOs, HIEs, value-based purchasing and other evolving models of care and reimbursement.
Founder’s Story
Curaspan started with a broken hip. When co-founder Tom Ferry’s wife’s grandmother broke her hip, the family quickly discovered that managing the transition from the hospital to a nursing home was far more difficult than anticipated. An experienced banking industry executive, Tom decided to create software to facilitate the process by automating the most laborious aspects—referring to the model as the “Travelocity for healthcare transitions,” Tom founded Curaspan in 1999. By 2001, Curaspan was the first company in the industry to automate the patient transition process and, as of this year, the company handles more than 20 percent of discharges from U.S. hospitals.
Guest post by Dean Wiech, managing director, Tools4ever.
No matter the industry, each time a purchase is made, business leaders always want to know what they are getting in return for their financial investment. Questions frequently asked include: “How is this going to help me?” and “What is my return on investment?” Another phrase, often uttered by “Mr. Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary from the popular show Shark Tank is, “What am I getting for my investment?”
By examining the answers to these questions, business managers and organizational leaders must ensure that their budget is being adhered to and that purchases by the organization are considered, or proven, not to be a “waste” of money.” Often, return on investment (ROI) is a combination of both “hard” and “soft” costs and savings, which can often be difficult to determine. The “hard” cost is easy to define: What am I spending now versus what will I be spending on a different product, solution or system, or by doing nothing? Alternately, how is this solution going to allow me to save money in the long run? In this scenario – “hard” costs and savings — there is a definitive dollar figure that is able to be applied to implementing a solution.
“Soft” savings are a bit more of a complex issue; they are more difficult to determine and to document. For example, time and labor saved, or stress saved by employees completing a task that takes 10 minutes versus 35 minutes are soft savings. Soft savings also might be seen in improvements in customer service or in the customer experience. It is difficult to put a dollar amount on these scenarios and improvements, but they do impact a business, its success and its financial performance.
Time is money, of course, but in the case of healthcare perhaps it’s more fitting to say that “time is life.” This savings equates to valuable potential life-saving time, as we well know, and, in turn, improves patient care. As healthcare organizations seek ways to allow clinicians the ability to focus more on patients rather than on information technology, there are some solutions available — many that that are often overlooked that allow them to reach their goals. Some of these technology solutions provide a direct correlation between a physician’s ability to enter an information system, retrieve or enter information and get back to focusing on patient care. Essentially, with these types of solutions, like access and identity management, physicians can get back to work more quickly and their interaction with the technology is reduced.
PatientKeeper provides workflow applications for physicians that transform hospital EHRs from what they typically are – a distraction or hindrance topatient care – into what they should be: an intuitive support system for physicians.
Curaspan offers effective and efficient solutions to help automate and standardize the care transition process, ultimately improving quality of care and financial outcomes through the use of care transition software.