Medicine and Healthcare

HealthBridge is a nationally recognized Health Information Exchange based in Cincinnati Ohio that has been in operation since 1997 and is regularly cited as an example of a financial sustainable HIE effort. Rodney Cain, Chief Information Officer will discuss the history and development the HealthBridge with a focus on strategies and lessons learned over the years as the chief technology architect of the HIE effort with an eye to the future and the impacts of HITECH and Meaningful Use.

HealthBridge has grown to a nationally recognized HIE that includes 24 hospitals and over 5000 physicians in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky and also provides support via the Collaborative Communities Model to HIEs in Bloomington, Indiana and Springfield, Ohio. HealthBridge was recently selected by the Office of the National Coordinator as one of the initial 32 HIT Regional Extension Centers.

Rodney is also involved in several HIT standards development processes and HealthBridge is one of the 15 organizations in the ONC Nationwide Health Information Network Collaborative (NHIN) effort.

Learn how a community is successfully pursuing health information exchange, interoperability and meaningful use across small and medium practices, hospitals and facilities using a combination of tools, guidance and incentives. This "Roadmap to Meaningful Use" program helps providers realize the quality, efficiency and financial incentives promised in the ARRA Stimulus funding.

All great ideas sound “insane” at first. This presentation will describe three insane ideas that Ovum believes will transform healthcare in the future including:
• Telehealth is for everyone, not just the elderly.
• Patient self-diagnosis is good and should be promoted.
• Personal health records are not just a passing trend, they are the solution.

Electronic health records may generate a new set of potential healthcare compliance risks and vulnerabilities. The new risk areas, including, the lack of authentication issues, over-documentation and/or cloning, may have significant ramifications beyond billing and coding. Electronic documentation tools offer exciting features designed to enhance communication for most health record users. The use of the system or specific features without appropriate education, training, infrastructure and monitoring may generate data integrity issues, manufactured documentation, increased risk exposure or even undesirable clinical outcomes. This presentation addresses certain areas of concern and discusses potential approaches for detection, evaluation and corrective action.

When I tried to move my health data from my hospital to Google Health, what happened was front page news; the transfer was so bad it was covered by the Information Quality Trainwrecks blog. But that doesn't change my conviction one bit: Good quality data, well managed, can vastly empower the new world of doctor-patient collaboration known as Participatory Medicine.

As an empowered e-patient, a business process analyst and a day-job data geek, in this talk I'll lay out the Society's vision for the role a good EHR can play in creating more efficient - and more effective - healthcare, in ways that benefit providers and patients alike.

Clinical groupware is a new and evolving model for the development and deployment of health information technology (HIT) platforms and applications having the following characteristics:
Use of the Internet and the web for EHR technology.
Explicit design for information sharing and online communication among providers and patients/consumers.
A modular or component architecture upon which applications can be aggregated to meet specific clinical and workflow tasks.
Patient/consumer engagement tools that facilitate ongoing health management and care coordination.
Interface and data exchange standards for information sharing that emerge in a market-driven manner.
The Clinical Groupware Collaborative is in a formative stage organization. To date, representatives from over 50 companies have expressed interest. We are working to be formally incorporated in November 2009.

New HIPAA Rules and EHRs: ARRA & Breach Notification

Business Associates first made their appearance in the HIPAA regulations almost a decade ago. During the first few years under the HIPAA regulations business associates used PHI of a HIPAA covered entity to do work for the covered entity including claims processing, data analysis, utilization review, benefit management, and practice management. In other words, the work was in the areas of administration, payment and health care operations. This electronic data sharing was between no more than two or three entities.

The world has advanced and we now have Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Personal Health Records (PHRs), Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) and Health Information Interchanges (HIEs) that share clinical information electronically. This data sharing is among a much larger universe, among many more entities, through much different technologies.

Until the HITECH Act PHRs, RHIOs and HIEs were not business associates. Business associates now include these new forms of clinical data repositories and sharing organizations and must keep most of the HIPAA privacy and security requirements as if they are covered entities and not just through a contract, a business associate agreement with a covered entity.

This session will outline the new world of business associates in clinical information sharing.

There is increasing interest in the United States and abroad in implementing electronic health records as part of an effort to improve the process, cost, and outcomes of health care. Kaiser Permanente has been working toward a goal of automating all health information on its 8.6 million members. Work began, in some ways more than 30 years ago. With focus on a vision for health care in the 21st century, our Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect® electronic health record has been fully deployed in all of our 431 medical offices, and 33 of our 36 hospitals (the remainder will be completed in the first quarter of 2010). We have also deployed a personal health record actively used by more than 3 million members. Along the way to this success, we have made mistakes and learned many hard lessons. The presentation will share that experience and describe some of the benefits of the system.

This panel, moderated by David Maizenberg, will feature former Division Director at FDA and 30 year biopharma veteran, Max Talbott, Joanna Napp, Healthcare and IP partner at Jackson Walker, and health care law expert Jeffery Drummond. The discussion will cover FDA regulation of Internet-based communications by biopharmaceutical companies, starting with the recent keyword advertising warning letters and subsequent draft regulations. The panel will also delve into possible scenarios for biopharmaceutical company participation in conversational and social media: the next frontier for communications with doctors, patients and wider communities of interest.