As Patients' Records Go Ditigal, Theft And Hacking Problems Grow. As more doctors and hospitals go digital with medical records, the size and frequency of data breaches are alarming privacy advocates and public health officials. Keeping records secure is a challenge that doctors, public health officials and federal regulators are just beginning to grasp.
And, as two recent incidents at Howard University Hospital show, inadequate data security can affect huge numbers of people. On May 14, federal prosecutors charged one of the hospital's medical technicians with violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. Prosecutors say that over a 17-month period Laurie Napper used her position at the hospital to gain access to patients' names, addresses and Medicare numbers in order to sell their information. A plea hearing has been set for June 12; Napper's attorney declined comment. Just a few weeks earlier, the hospital notified more than 34,000 patients that their medical data had been compromised. Ronald J. What Is A Data Breach? Health - Zoe Read - Harlem's Hidden HIV Epidemic. Although awareness of HIV is widespread in the New York neighborhood, translating knowledge about safe practices into action is a different story.
Performers at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ sing during a memorial ceremony. (Don Small/Canaan Baptist Church) The gold reception room in Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem seemed very large one Saturday afternoon, with about a dozen people sitting inside, praying and recalling those who had died of complications from AIDS. The few people filled out paperwork to get tested for HIV in a van that waited outside, while a man with HIV lectured the small audience on the virus.
When asked the ways in which the virus is spread, a man in the audience incorrectly said "saliva. " Others were surprised that people with non-detectable HIV, meaning the virus is under control, can still pass it on to others. The Vivian L. "If you touch one person, it's good enough for me," Hudson says. "Yes, we do talk about condoms.
"I was kind of promiscuous. Oregon's Medicaid Experiment Represents A 'Defining Moment' : Shots - Health Blog. The things that Amy Vance does for James Prasad are pretty simple: She calls doctors with him, organizes his meds, and helps him keep tabs on his blood pressure, blood sugar and weight. hide captionOregon Gov. John Kitzhaber is leading a $2 billion health care experiment in the state, aimed at changing the way the sickest people in Oregon get health care. Here, he speaks during a press conference in Portland earlier this month. Don Ryan/AP Oregon Gov. These simple things — and the relationship between a health coach like Vance and a chronically ill Medicaid patient like Prasad — are a big part of a $2 billion health care experiment in Oregon. Gov. Here's how it will work: Each city, like Portland, Salem and Eugene, will have its own umbrella group for caring for the Medicaid population, known as a "coordinated care organization.
" Indeed, the state's leaders are putting their political reputations on the line for this deal. Unions and businesses in the state also back the program. Federal rule change rocks HIV programs | Georgia Health News. HIV/AIDS service programs say a rule change by a federal agency would squeeze their budgets to the point that they may not be able to serve as many patients. The Health Resources and Services Administration is now requiring that rent, utilities and insurance costs be classified as administrative expenses under parts of the federal Ryan White HIV/AIDS program. As such, these costs will be charged to the administrative cap of 10 percent of the total amount awarded. That means many HIV service programs will have to seek other ways to cover those expenses. “All agencies are scrambling to find ways to shore up their budgets,’’ says Larry Lehman, executive director of the nonprofit AID Gwinnett/Ric Crawford Clinic, which serves HIV patients in Gwinnett, Newton and Rockdale counties.
The rule change means AID Gwinnett will have to find an extra $47,000 for its budget, Lehman says. A national organization of HIV service providers has asked HRSA’s administrator to reverse the accounting change. Many hospitals, doctors offer cash discount for medical bills. The 10 Greatest Medical Inventions of the Last 50 Years. Most doctors headed for penalty over Medicare quality reporting. Washington Absent a significant change in the trajectory of Medicare’s physician quality reporting system, a large majority of doctors will set themselves up for future rate cuts by failing to report enough quality measures to the federal government in 2013. A recent trends report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services shows that fewer than 200,000 physicians, out of the more than 600,000 who were eligible for the incentive program, reported PQRS measures in 2010. More than 125,000 physicians reporting as individuals met enough of the requirements to share a total of nearly $400 million in bonuses, but hundreds of thousands of eligible doctors did not attempt to meet the pay-for-reporting criteria.
More than 50,000 tried for the bonuses but did not report enough quality measures to hit the minimum. Organized medicine groups, including the American Medical Association, have urged CMS not to base 2015 PQRS penalties on the 2013 reporting year. A flurry of Medicare penalties. Patients Find Each Other Online To Jump-Start Medical Research : Shots - Health Blog. Hide captionKatherine Leon says she spends up to 12 hours a day online interacting with others who share her rare heart condition.
Emily Bogle/NPR Katherine Leon says she spends up to 12 hours a day online interacting with others who share her rare heart condition. People with extremely rare diseases are often scattered across the world, and any one hospital has a hard time locating enough individuals to conduct meaningful research. But one woman with an extremely rare heart condition managed to do what many hospitals couldn't. Katherine Leon connected with enough people online to interest the Mayo Clinic in a research trial.
Leon was 38, in great health and had just given birth to a baby boy. "I had been in great health before — or so I thought — and it was just a complete surprise. She was diagnosed with something called spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD. Instead, the walls of her arteries had torn, and tiny fragments of tissue had blocked the flow of blood to her heart. MEDINFO 2013 - Preliminary Call for Papers. 20 - 23 August 2013, Copenhagen, Denmark. The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) announced that the 14th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics (MEDINFO 2013) will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark.
MEDINFO 2013 is a premier conference that brings together world leaders, researchers, practitioners, educators, and students to exchange ideas and contribute to the latest developments, innovations, and global trends in this rapidly advancing, multidisciplinary field. The theme for MEDINFO 2013 is "Conducting medical informatics by Converging technologies, Conveying sciences and Connecting people". The congress welcomes submissions on both emerging methodologies that contribute to the conceptual and scientific foundations of biomedical and health informatics, and successful implementations of innovative application, integration, and evaluation of eHealth systems and solutions. Representing and understanding biomedical knowledge: Enabling cost-effective health care: Engineering a More Nutritious Banana - Brian Fung - Health. Enhancing the humble fruit could be an efficient way to improve global health. Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters Ever since Norman Borlaug revolutionized the world's food supply by designing a hardier strain of wheat, scientists have been fascinated with the idea of engineering their way to foods that are even healthier than their natural cousins.
We now have access to herbicide-resistant corn, tomatoes that are ever-ripe, calcium-fortified orange juice -- even rice that's high in vitamin A. The latest product to get this treatment? Bananas. That's right: the humble fruit that comes mostly from overseas is about to get a serious makeover, if Australian researcher James Dale is successful: India and Uganda are the top two banana producers in the world.
Using genes from a type of inedible banana that's incredibly rich in vitamin A, Dale says he's managed to increase the average banana's vitamin A content by a factor of four -- enough to provide half of a person's recommended daily intake. Does Facebook Turn People Into Narcissists? Mimi Haddon/Getty Images Recently I tried to persuade a friend, a professional woman in her 40s, to create a Facebook account. Like many people, I’m a regular user, usually to post photos and updates of my daughter’s sports and academic accomplishments — and to keep track of friends and family.
But my friend believed Facebook would drain her time. She said that if she couldn’t maintain friendships in the real world, she wasn’t interested in keeping up with the small details of people’s lives. There has been a lot of scholarship devoted to the study of Facebook, sparking debate about the mental health and personality traits of frequent users. Most recently, research from Western Illinois University suggested, like other studies before it, that Facebook appeals to our most narcissistic tendencies. The study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, asked 292 people to answer questions aimed at measuring how self-involved they were.
Mythbusters: Library Edition. A long time ago, on a college campus far, far away, a student stepped into her advisor’s office, bursting with enthusiasm. “I’ve decided to get a master’s degree in library science,” she announced. The response was swift and devastating. “Are you nuts?” Thundered the advisor. “You’ll ruin your life. I found another advisor. Fast-forward 25 years. My profession is in the midst of a radical transformation, but the old myths like the ones my advisor believed in still persist.
So it is time, once again, to take a stab at debunking some of these myths. The myths outlined below were gathered from responses to queries I posted to my colleagues on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. Special thanks to Max Anderson, Roy Brown, Patricia Gallagher, Darcy Gervasio, Gail Hendler, Leigh Mihlrad, Tom Nielsen, Karen Sorensen and Vedana Vaidhyanathan for sharing their thoughts and ideas. MYTH: “Oh, you’re a librarian. REALITY: Maybe. . . . Librarians are expert multitaskers. REALITY: Please—bother us!
Talk to Us! Health Journalism from a Patient's Perspective. As a patient who was asked to speak at the Association of Health Care Journalists 2012 conference, I felt a bit covert. I wasn't in a "backless gown," rolling my IV pole down the hall of some hospital's cardiac care unit. I wore an official lanyard and badge and mixed among health care journalists, yet I felt more like a dugout mom than savvy reporter. My goal was to present the patient's view. And I tried, in each session, to "be the ball" and hear what was presented from the alternate perspective, my persistent viewpoint as a user and purchaser of medical services. It's complicated. Yet the patient can easily imagine what it would be like to change places with the doctor. Here is one example of the great doctor-patient divide: nothing is more defeating to a patient than hearing how physically healthy we appear.
The fundamental problem in this anecdote and ones like it is that the health care provider can never, ever relate to what the patient has gone through. Literacy, Cognitive Function, and Health: R... [J Gen Intern Med. 2012. Study reveals scale of errors on doctors' prescriptions | Society. More than one in 20 prescriptions have some sort of error, the study found.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian More than one in six patients who are put on medication after seeing their GP are given a prescription containing an error, according to the General Medical Council. A study commissioned by the GMC, which regulates doctors, found that over the course of a year, one in 20 prescription items had some sort of error or monitoring of the patient taking the drug was not good enough – this usually involved drugs where regular blood tests were needed to ensure the drug was not causing other problems. With 900m items prescribed in England every year, this amounts to 45m errors. There were also more errors among people over 75, who are often on more drugs. Most of the errors fell into the category of oversights rather than mistakes, such as the GP failing to write down how often the patient should take their pills or the correct dose. Study: C-Sections Needed in Developing World | Health.
A new study suggests that at least one surgical procedure, Caesarean delivery, is a highly effective way of improving health at a reasonable cost in developing countries. Researchers weighed the value of making caesarean deliveries more accessible to pregnant women. An estimated 270,000 women die each year from complications during their pregnancy. One of the most common is obstructed labor, where the fetus cannot move down the birth canal. When that happens, mother and baby may both die. Even if the mother survives, she is at risk of developing an obstetric fistula, which leads to incontinence and, often, divorce and social isolation.
"So it's a real problem and easily fixable. As long as the mother gets to a district hospital or a referral center that's able to perform caesarean deliveries, this can be prevented," said Harvard Medical School researcher Blake Alkire. He notes that deaths from obstructed labor are virtually unknown in wealthier countries. Login. Planned Parenthood In Ohio, Wisconsin Loses Battles. WASHINGTON-- The GOP may insist that there is no war on women, but the campaign against Planned Parenthood, which provides health care to one in five American women each year, is gaining ground in the Midwest. Republican state representatives in Ohio slipped an amendment into the state's substitute budget bill on Tuesday that puts family planning clinics like Planned Parenthood at the bottom of funding priorities and blocks them from receiving funding for cancer screenings and HIV and domestic violence services.
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin announced on Friday that it has stopped providing nonsurgical abortions, which make up about 25 percent of all abortions performed at its clinics, due to a new state law that criminalizes physicians who perform them. Defunding Planned Parenthood through Ohio's budget bill is a way for GOP lawmakers to pass the measure without having to vote on a separate bill, which would likely cause controversy. House Finance Chairman Rep.
Breast Cancer: Not One Disease but 10, Researchers Say. In a wide-ranging new study, researchers have classified breast cancer into 10 different subtypes — a finding that could change the future of breast cancer diagnoses, treatment and survival. The research team known as the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium (METABRIC) analyzed the genetic makeup of 997 breast tumors from nearly 2,000 women from the U.K. and Canada who were diagnosed five to 10 years ago.
The researchers extensively monitored the genetic details of the tumor samples — looking not only at gene mutations, but also at their specific activity — and compared the findings to the women’s age at diagnosis and their long-term survival rates. (PHOTOS: A Photographer’s Intimate Account of Her Mother’s Cancer Ordeal) By the end of the study, which took some five years to complete, the researchers had identified 10 classifications of tumors, based on their genetic fingerprints.
(MORE: Ultrasounds and MRIs Detect More Breast Cancer, Study Says) #Healthcare #Providers and #SocialMedia: Where do we go for guidance? · docforeman. Californians Struggle To Find Accurate Medical Pricing. Blogger: Increased focus on data can help EHRs mature. Rural health, primary care and the importance of workforce | Occupy Healthcare. States Seek to Curb Exorbitant Drug Costs Incurred by Patients. ‘Obamacare’ or the GOP: Which would throw granny off a cliff? Wonkbook: Why you should care that 70% of antibiotics go into animal feed. I think if I wore this shirt with my #thewalkinggallery jacket, a small #healthcare revolution would break out. U.S. Spends Too Little on Public Health Initiatives: Report. Surgeon General | SurgeonGeneral.gov. To Seriously Improve Global Health, Reinvent the Toilet. Making Data Matter : Bridging Business & Healthcare. Log In - The New York Times. New Rule Cuts Student Health Plans Temporary Breaks. Is California Ready for Millions of Newly Insured? - Features.
Doctors Are in Bad Mood. Visualizing Health And Well-Being Around The World. Regulating Our Sugar Habit. Patients directed to online tools don't necessarily use them :: Feb. 15, 2012. FDA: Shortage of methotrexate can be averted. Obama Shift on Contraception Splits Catholics. In Small California Hospitals, the Marketing of Back Surgery. New Guide to Who Really Shouldn't Eat Gluten. Mini-Med Health Plans Useless to Consumers. Too Many Kids Breathe Others' Smoke in Cars: CDC.
Paying for stem cells: A bad idea. There is something wrong. Susan G. Komen Foundation Website Apparently Hacked After Planned Parenthood Controversy. California website offers help on long term care coverage | HealthyCal. Kansas Health Institute | Nursing home administrators pan abuse hotline. VA taps DSHI to develop triage app for tablets. NIH funds help lead to medical advances. Seniors need Congress to act Too many medical tests? Routine checks getting second look.
After 10 years of saving lives… UNICEF: 750,000 Yemeni children are malnourished. Advocates Demand Clarity About Options For Patients In Financial Need. How to solve the crisis behind Bribegate for Chinese doctors. Supreme Court Allows New Plaintiffs in Health Care Law Challenge. Supreme Court holds the fate of Medicaid - J. Lester Feder.
Demand for medical office buildings expected to flourish :: Jan. 17, 2012. Informed Patient: Diagnostic Errors Highlight Need for Second Opinions - Health Blog. FDA fines Red Cross nearly $9.6 million for blood safety lapses. Electronic medical records can get patient????involved. Melinda Gates: Will You Join Our Conversation on Women's and Children's Health? The Charlotte Post - U.S. grant benefits kids health insurance. FG-Integrating. Cleveland Clinic uses iPads to ease children's fears. Feds Bolster High Risk Insurance Funds In Two States. Heal Your Heart; Heal Your Life. Laptop Wi-Fi said to nuke sperm, but caveats abound. Retail health is hot, especially for the young, affluent and not particularly sick.
Geriatric Nursing Resources for Care of Older Adults. American Medical Association - Physicians, Medical Students & Patients (AMA) APHA: American Public Health Association. American Nurses Association.