Social Media and Healthcare: Creating a Healthy Relationship
Should healthcare organizations use social media to connect with patients and increase quality of care? Let's talk about social media and healthcare.
5 Tips For Educating Your Employees on HIPAA Compliance
If you read our most recent blog on HIPAA violations, you know that employee error is one of the five most common HIPAA violations. It could be a lost electronic device or an unintentional error, but either way a breach can drastically effect your organization. Employees that work with patient data are essential to keeping your organization HIPAA compliant. From hold trainings to having a foolproof social media policy, here are 5 tips for helping your employees understand HIPAA compliance.
What You Need to Know About HIPAA Violations
With HIPAA Phase 2 audits looming on the horizon, many organizations are gearing up for the audits with internal assessments. We've already talked about how your organization might be unwittingly violating HIPAA, but what penalties are you really facing?
How To Recover From a HIPAA Breach
If you find yourself in the midst of a HIPAA breach, your first instinct might be to panic, but you need not. While a security breach of any kind is a high stress event, keeping cool headed and following tried and true breach recovery protocols will help you avoid further trouble down the line.
How to Prepare for HIPAA Phase 2 Audits
We’ve known for a while that HIPAA Phase 2 audits are coming, and we know that the randomly selected hospitals to be audited have been chosen. Pending the completion of the online portal for data submission, the audits will begin.
6 Ways You Might Be Unwittingly Making a HIPAA Violation
With all this talk about making patient records more accessible to care teams via the magic of the electronic record, HIPAA and HITECH— the two laws that govern patient privacy — might seem like a bit of a downer. They serve a very explicit purpose, however, and ensuring that you are always in compliance will not only save you legal woes, but money in the form of fines and penalties for breaches. There are some obvious breaches of confidentiality that we must strive to avoid: you would never, for instance, post to all your Facebook followers the name, diagnosis and prognosis of a particularly difficult patient that you had today. What you might do instead, though, is go home and tell your spouse all about it. That’s a HIPAA violation.
What HIPAA Audits Mean for your Organization
For quite a while now, news that a wave of HIPAA audits are on the horizon has been circulating in the healthcare scene. But this time, these audits are likely to include financial penalties for violations--new in 2015. So what areas should you be scouring to ensure you're not accidentally committing any violations? In this post, we'll take a look at what HIPAA audits could mean for your organization.
New Rules for ACOs
Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) may have an additional three years before penalties would be enforced for poor performance, according to a new proposal by the Federal government. These groups of doctors, hospitals, and providers that care for Medicare patients work jointly as ACOs toward the goal of retaining whatever additional financial resources are left over after completed care. Currently, there are about 330 ACOs in the United States, and together they have saved Medicare more than $700 million in healthcare spending.
Top 5 Strategic Planning Challenges for CIOs
The Chief Information Officer in a healthcare system has perhaps one of the most complex and ever-evolving roles in the hospital C-Suite today. Since information technology has now permeated our entire culture - and particularly in medicine - executive level information management is hot field nowadays. Strategic planning within an organization tends to encompass many areas - but for the Chief Information Officer, most of their planning requirements fall under the category of information management. For most modern hospitals, information management is largely to do with electronic health records and the business transactions that surround them. While CIOs are not down in the trenches laying the groundwork for databases or troubleshooting minor issues, they are overseeing the purchasing, implementation and staffing needs to make the whole operation run smoothly.
3 Steps for Successful EHR Implementation
Lately there have been a number of changes in the healthcare industry that are targeted to provide quality healthcare to patients. Adapting to these changes is critical to the viability and profitability of your medical practice. 1. Implement Electronic Health Record (EHR) system If you haven’t adopted the electronic health record system, then now is the final call to do it. The government has announced July 1, 2014 deadline for physicians to implement EHR system or they will penalized beginning in 2015. Through implementation of electronic health records, physicians will be able to have complete access to comprehensive and accurate information, which will enable them to provide improved and quality medical care to patients. According to government statistics, providers using the EHR system have reported: •94% physicians said with EHR patient records are available every time •88% report EHR benefits clinical procedures of practice •75% providers reported improved patient care