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.

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.

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?

Windows 7 is probably in your not-too-distant future, assuming you have not installed it already. While its security measures are a significant step up from XP and Vista, they can still benefit from some help, especially in a work environment made riskier by having most computers out of the office most of the time. A new white paper by security vendor Sophos, "Seven for 7," offers seven best practices for keeping your company and your data more secure when using Windows 7. This summary includes a link to download the full white paper.

Among all the ways in which home health care is unique, its proclivity to attract new vendors to serve its needs is the most consistent and yet the hardest to comprehend. Software vendors with back office billing systems for hospitals can be counted on two hands. Our recent attempt to get an accurate count of similar companies with home care and/or hospice applications found nearly 50. Is there room for one or two more? There will undoubtedly be at least that many at this year's NAHC Annual Meeting. Only time will tell whether they will still be around for next year's meeting in Las Vegas. Here are two that have come to our attention recently.

We offer an early look at technology vendors' plans for this fall's NAHC meeting, beginning with the names that have been in the news lately as subjects or objects of mergers and acquisitions.