Hard agree, and not just because I'm a spreadsheet nerd. Why are we all here? Isn't it in the service…
Morning Headlines 8/18/14
Health IT Policy Governance Subgroup
Epic President Carl Dvorak testifies on the company’s position and progress on interoperability.
MModal CEO Duncan James resigns and a new board is named two weeks after the company emerges from Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Pervasive Medicare Fraud Proves Hard to Stop
A New York Times article says HHS’s fraud prevention efforts are minimally effective because the agency doesn’t manage private contractors well and provider appeals have overwhelmed the system.
Variation in charges for 10 common blood tests in California hospitals: a cross-sectional analysis
A study of 2011 California data finds that hospitals charged between $10 and $10,169 for the same lipid panel lab test. The same author previously found that the list price for an uncomplicated appendectomy prices ranged from $1,500 to $187,000.
Here’s an idea to assist interoperability: Give the permission for what to share, with whom, to the patient. As Carl Dvorak points out http://www.healthit.gov/facas/sites/faca/files/GSG_Testimony_CarlDvorak_2014-08-15.pdf , a major roadblock for sharing PHI is the trust network, which becomes nearly impossible to manage at the third-party level. Every PHI steward is terrified they will make a sharing error. If we change our model so that the patient herself gets custody of what amounts to a permission-sharing token, we can solve that issue. The mechanics of doing so are beyond a simple comment here, but the technical ability to do so is not difficult once the paradigm changes from “I the healthcare provider am the steward of who sees your information,” to “You the patient are the steward of who sees the information.”