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The experience at St. John's Regional Medical Center in Joplin, MO, after the tornado is an excellent example of how electronic health records (EHRs) can improve disaster response if the system is structured correctly, says Elliot Davis, internet security officer and director of information technology at Beaumont Health System in Grosse Pointe, MI. The key is to have the data accessible from a distant location, as St. John's did, or on "the cloud," in which data is stored on another company's servers or spread through the Internet, Davis says.
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Cloud computing can be a lifesaver for healthcare providers recovering from a disaster, says Bassam Tabbara, PhD, chief technology officer and co-founder of Symform, a data storage provider based in Seattle.
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A 34-year-old nursing student complaining of headaches presented at a local university hospital. Diagnostic testing showed a small aneurysm. During a procedure intended to repair the aneurysm, the woman's brain was pierced.
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Crico Strategies, the medical malpractice company owned by and serving the Harvard medical community in Cambridge, MA, recommends these remedies for the common causes of obstetrics (OB) claims:
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When an EF-5 tornado, among the biggest ever recorded, hit St. John's Regional Medical Center in Joplin, MO, the damage was so severe that all the patients had to be evacuated and taken to other hospitals outside the community. Their medical records were accessible, however, and the hospital was providing care again within a week, all because the hospital had adopted electronic health records (EHRs) only weeks before the disaster.
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued an interim final rule to adopt the first two in a series of "operating rules" that will standardize the HIPAA standards for electronic administrative/financial transactions.
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Compliance and regulatory officers have until Aug. 1 to comment on a proposed rule that includes a new accounting of disclosures provision that gives individuals the right to receive a report on who has electronically accessed their protected health information (PHI).
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Improved technology is creating an obligation for healthcare providers to recover patient data soon after a disaster, says Gary L. Kaplan, JD, an attorney with the law firm of Thorp Reed & Armstrong in Pittsburgh.
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Unlike the current privacy rule which identifies purposes that might be omitted from disclosure accounting reports, the proposed rule published on May 31, 2011, identifies those purposes for which disclosures must be tracked and reported.
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In spite of increased focus on regulatory compliance, a survey of more than 100 information technology (IT) administrators, managers and executives of healthcare organizations reports ongoing data breaches.
