This article is occasioned by the lead front page story in The New York Times on Feb. 20, 2013, entitled “A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry.” (goo.gl). The story describes the way in which several large software companies have been able to push small players out of the electronic medical record (EMR) business, have reaped enormous profits, and are selling software that many physicians are finding very difficult to use despite increasing government pressure to adopt such systems.
Along the same lines, the blog, “Health Care Renewal,” which is written by a sophisticated physician/health information technology (IT) professional who is a critic of the headlong rush to implement what he views as inferior software, ran a story about the extremely poor design of some of the software now in use. It is entitled “Are the Health IT Hyper-Enthusiasts Inept, or Merely Insane?” (goo.gl) This posting is worth reading just for the tragicomic value of the description of the cyber gymnastics one must perform to enter data into one of these systems. Here's some information about the person who wrote that piece: “Health Technology's ‘Essential Critic’ Warns Of Medical Mistakes” goo.gl.
But the worst aspect of what is happening is that the continued leaks of information out of these electronic record systems is causing the government to become ever more aggressive in cracking down on those responsible for the leaks. As I warned years ago, this burden is going to fall on the physicians and other clinicians who use these systems, not on insurance companies and others, who were imagined at that time to be the larger part of potential confidentiality and security problems. Encouraging the health care system to adopt the changes that are really needed to keep electronic records relatively secure is going to require some very harsh examples of government punishing the careless.
As you know, enforcement of the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the HIPAA Security Rule (“rule” is a gov-speak euphemism for hundreds of pages of regulations) has been relatively gentle up to now, so that those who were found to be in violation of the regulations were most often simply told to correct the problem and report back when they had taken corrective steps.
Not any more. According to an article in the Feb. 4, 2013, issue of American Medical News, the enforcement of these HIPAA related regulations is about to become much more aggressive and quite punitive with the risks of heavy fines for certain violations. Read this article to get a hint of what it all means for future enforcement of the privacy and security regulations by visiting “HIPAA Gets Tougher on Physicians” at .
Paul Mosher, M.D., is the former chair of the APsaA Committee on Confidentiality, a former member of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Committee on Confidentiality, and a current member of the APA Committee on Electronic Medical Records.