Morning Headlines 9/30/15

Senate Committee Chairmen Urge Administration to Immediately Adopt Stage Two Modifications for Electronic Health Records Program, Make Rules for Stage Three Final No Sooner Than 2017

Senators John Thune (R-SD) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), along with a 116-member bipartisan group of representatives, ask the administration to immediately adopt MU2 modifications that would introduce a 90-day reporting period for 2015 and scales back patient engagement metrics.

Thousands of ‘directly hackable’ hospital devices exposed online

White-hat hackers Scott Erven and Mark Collao find thousands of medical devices that are exposed online and vulnerable to attack. At one large, multi-facility health system, the team discovered “21 anesthesia, 488 cardiology, 67 nuclear medical, and 133 infusion systems, 31 pacemakers, 97 MRI scanners, and 323 picture archiving and communications gear.”

OCR Should Strengthen Its Followup of Breaches of Patient Health Information Reported by Covered Entities

An HHS OIG report recommends that the Office of Civil Rights collect breach reports on all data breaches, instead of just just large ones. The report also recommends improved tracking of corrective actions and prior breaches.

Study casts doubt on computer-aided mammograms

A  study of computer-assisted mammogram analysis finds that computers do not find more tumors than radiologists, despite costing $400 million annually and being used to screen 90 percent of all mammograms processed annually.