More NY docs apply for EHR software than program can give out
At least 1,300 physicians applied for the Primary Care Information Project in New York City that will be providing 1,000 physicians with discounted EHR software and support, reports American Medical News.
Physicians qualify for the program if at least 30% of their patients participate in state-funded insurance plans, such as Medicaid, or if they practice in one of three low-income neighborhoods.
Selected physicians will receive eClinicalWorks' EHR software and two years of technical support, which normally would cost at least $12,000 per physician. Physicians in the program will pay $4,000 to help cover a city-organized office workflow assessment, and they must provide their own hardware and high-speed Internet connection to run the system, American Medical News reports.
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Survey: Most say EHR benefits outweigh risks
Forty-seven percent of respondents to Kaiser Permanente's recent telephone survey of 1,000 Americans say that paper records are more secure than EHRs. In addition, 57% say that they have never heard or read about EHRs.
Despite this unfamiliarity, however, 73% agree that the benefits of EHRs in emergencies and in improving quality of care outweigh privacy and security worries. The survey also found that:
- 51% would choose a physician based on his or her use of EHRs, all other factors being equal
- 72% say that EHRs are more efficient
- 31% say that better emergency care is the greatest benefit of EHR use
Click here for more information.
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Docs use less offline, more online resources
A lot has changed in just a few years regarding physicians' online behaviors, and anyone using models that are even just two years old will be behind the curve in terms of understanding how physicians gather information today, reports Manhattan Research in its new Taking the Pulse v7.0 study.
"Now that virtually all physicians are using the Internet in some capacity, the focus has really shifted toward understanding the rapidly evolving way in which physicians have incorporated technology and the Internet into the way they practice medicine," Meredith Abreu, vice president of research at Manhattan Research, told HCPro. "We saw a decrease in use of certain offline media sources--as much as 20% in two years--as physicians start to migrate toward online resources for gathering clinical information."
The study also shows how physicians are using and choosing mobile devices and offline information, as well as their level of interest in Web 2.0 technologies such as streaming video, blogs, podcasting, and social networking.
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Tip: Educate staff on identity theft scenarios and risks
Because the electronic healthcare environment lends itself to privacy breaches, it is important to educate your staff on the scenarios and why there is institutional risk. A recent EpicTide survey of hospitals indicated that 48% of the respondents had at least one incident of medical identity theft in the last 12 months.
Some breaches may seem innocuous, but are frequently tied to highly risky legal scenarios in which healthcare providers find themselves in the middle of divorce, child custody, blackmail, identity theft, and organized crime court cases. At the extreme is medical identity theft in which patients suffer financial, professional, emotional, and even life-threatening consequences.
Address the following situations with your staff:
- Medical identity theft
- Identity theft
- Family member medical record snooping
- Neighbor medical record snooping
- VIPs (very important patients) at the hospital
- Criminals and the accused at the hospital
Editor's note: Kurt Long, the CEO of Saint Petersburg, FL-based privacy auditing company EpicTide provided this tip. For more information, go to www.epictide.com. For well-documented and extreme consequences for patient victims, read The World Privacy Forum's report titled, Medical Identity Theft: The Information Crime that Can Kill You. Go to www.worldprivacyforum.org and click on the medical identity theft link.
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PPV: Learning and communication are the core of facilitywide implementation
Evanston (IL) Northwestern Healthcare (ENH) is an integrated, academic healthcare system comprised of three hospitals, 851 beds, and 65 group practices. When ENH decided in 2001 to go electronic, training was a major part of the initiative--and it involved nearly 11,000 staff members. Luckily, ENH had Chief Learning Officer Jane Dowd to lead the effort.
"I was invited to a meeting to hear about a new 'tool' that ENH purchased," says Dowd, who has 20 years of training experience and a master's degree in education. "I didn't know until then that [the administration] was looking at me to lead the education portion."
The tool, of course, was an EHR. To learn how Dowd and team pulled off this huge training initiative, click here. The cost is $10. Subscribers to Electronic Health Records Briefing can sign on for free access.
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