Technology

The Office for the National Coordinator (ONC) has announced the winners of its Blue Button Co-Design Challenge this week at the Consumer Health IT Summit, which is a daylong event held during the annual Health IT Week.

Samaritan Medical Center, Watertown, N.Y., a 294-bed community hospital, has seen its volume of data to grow significantly in the few years. That, in turn, has prompted the hospital to streamline the ways it manages and backs up its data from a business continuity perspective.

Medical identity fraud has increased nearly 20 percent compared to the year before in the U.S., affecting an estimated 1.84 victims and having a total out-of-pocket medical costs incurred by medical identity theft victims to be $12.3 billion. Those are takeaways of the 2013 Survey on Medical Identity Theft, an annual survey now in its fourth year, which was released yesterday by the Ponemon Institute LLC, Traverse City, Mich., and sponsored by Portland, Ore.-base ID Experts. The report’s release roughly coincided with the launch (on August 29) of the Medical Identity Fraud Alliance (MIFA), an industry group formed to raise public awareness and to come up with potential ways to address the medical identity theft.

Systems that read and manage outside CDs containing medical image studies (X-Ray, CT, Ultrasound, etc.) are a real benefit to healthcare users who have been challenged with issues associated with the CDs patients bring along with them to hospital and office visits. Many times CDs are difficult to handle because the imaging systems used to burn the CDs are from different manufacturers or use different software to write to the CD; and some require different readers.

The results of a new study, conducted by the Atlanta-based Porter Research and sponsored by Covisint, seem to indicate that healthcare and healthcare IT leaders are ready to turn to the cloud in order to support population health management and accountable care organization development