This week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology named Certification Commission for Health Information Technology and Drummond Group Inc. as initial Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies for the temporary electronic health records certification program. CCHIT does operate a subcommittee focused on post-acute EHRs, including home health care and hospice software applications, though no stimulus funds have yet been earmarked for these healthcare segments.

Suncoast Solutions CEO Teresa Craig served for 18 months on the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT®) sub-committee assigned to establish standards for home health and hospice software applications. In this HCTR interview, she describes the experience and opines on home care's and hospice's chances to ever see any portion of the stimulus funds that hospitals and physicians are expecting.

The not-for-profit "Privacy Rights Clearinghouse" reports on its web site that there have been 307 privacy breaches since 2005, just in healthcare. The total across all industries is much higher. Those breaches compromised personal health information of more than 14 and half million individuals and cost the negligent healthcare organizations millions of dollars in fines and mandatory patient notification costs. Here are stories of only three recent cases, each of them preventable, that made headlines because of the size of the guilty companies. They will survive. The question is, would your organization survive a mistake like one of these?

On August 10, CMS issued final regulations that will fully implement improvements to the Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
PERM measures improper payments in Medicaid and CHIP and produces national-level error rates for each program. These reviews are conducted to determine whether the sampled cases meet applicable Medicaid and CHIP fee-for-service, managed care, and eligibility requirements. Generally, PERM is conducted in 17 states annually; therefore a single state typically participates in the program once every three years.

CMS has published resources to help providers prepared for the upcoming transition to Version 5010 and ICD-10. Published resources for providers, vendors, and payers to prepare for the transition include fact sheets for educating staff.