e-CareManagement blog

Chronic Disease Management • Technology • Strategy • Issues and Trends

Privacy Law Showdown? Setting the Stage

Today’s post is the first in a series entitled: Modifications to HIPAA Privacy Laws: Impact on Microsoft HealthVault, Google Health, and other PHRs.  We’ll explore how recent changes in privacy provisions of  ARRA/HITECH Federal stimulus legislation affect personal health information (PHI) platform companies (e.g., HealthVault, Google Health,  Dossia) and personal health record (PHR) companies. Health IT expert and journalist Neil Versel described the issue [...]

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Is the Health Data Liquidity Glass Half Empty or Half Full?

What a difference in attitude! Compare two press announcements from April 5: 1) CCHIT:  Interoperability Isn’t Doable With Today’s Technology . Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), Interoperability: Supplying the Building Blocks for a Patient-centered EHR , April 5, 2009 This report…(is)  also an attempt to inject a dose of reality into the discussion [...]

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EHR 2.0: Thinking Outside the Cat Box

One of the potential dangers of limiting $17 B HITECH federal stimulus funds to electronic health records (EHRs) is the risk of locking-in outdated technologies. Let’s consider what this might mean. If you think of today’s EHR technology as EHR 1.0, what might EHR 2.0 look like? This post presents a number of innovative ways to conceptualize EHR [...]

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Why Clinical Groupware May Be the Next Big Thing in Health IT

by David C. Kibbe MD, MBA What would you call health care software that: Is Web-based and networkable, therefore highly scalable and inexpensive to purchase and use; Provides a ‘unified view’ of a patient from multiple sources of data and information; Is designed to be used interactively – by providers and patients alike – to [...]

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Leavitt’s Framework Shoehorns the HIPAA Privacy Rule onto Your Personal Health Information

by Vince Kuraitis and David C. Kibbe MD, MBA Have you ever heard anyone tell a happy story of how easy it is to get a copy of their paper medical records? Departing Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt is laying the groundwork for this same story to apply to access to YOUR electronic [...]

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The Yabuts of Sharing Data Between Google Health and HealthVault

“What’s a yabut?” you ask. Yabut is a term coined by my esteemed colleague, the late Paul Fetrow.  It stands for “Yeah….but….” Yabuts are the gotchas, the fine print, the details that affect the terms of any agreement.  For example, the telecom companies will tell you its easy to switch carriers now that we have number [...]

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Picturing the PHIN as One Interoperable Network

Will the Microsoft HealthVault, Google Health, and Dossia personal health information (PHI) platforms be able to exchange data?  In our introductory essay announcing the Birth of the Personal Health Information Network (PHIN), Dr. David Kibbe and I posed a critical question: What will the PHIN look like?  Will there be multiple, non-interoperable, competing networks or just one interoperable [...]

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CCHIT Should Support BOTH the HL7 CCD and the ASTM CCR for PHRs.

The federal government sponsored Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT ) is undertaking a certification process for personal health records (PHRs) . The CCHIT PHR Work Group has invited public comment on the First Draft of the PHR Certification Criteria . The current draft of the PHR Certification Criteria specifies use of the HL7 [...]

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From PHRs to PHRSs

Personal health records (PHRs) are evolving toward becoming Personal Health Record Systems (PHRSs). …that’s my key takeaway from attending the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Project Health Design (PHD) conference in Washington D.C. on September 17. The conference was entitled  A ‘Report Out’ from Project HealthDesign and Forum on Next-Generation PHRs . A PHD Fact Sheet capsulizes the [...]

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