http://williamyasnoff.com informing healthcare Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:59:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In an op-ed article in Business Week online posted 12/19/08, I describe how health record banks (HRBs) can solve the problem of making complete patient records available at any point of care while providing electronic medical records (EMRs) to all physicians and fully protecting individual privacy. I then ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=57 In my last posting, I explained why the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) Privacy Rule does not really assure our privacy. This time I want to address another widespread myth – namely, that personal health records (PHRs) have no privacy protection. The news here (thankfully) is ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=55 It has been widely asserted, and most people believe, that the Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects the privacy of health information. Unfortunately, this is a myth. Just as the "P" in HIPAA does not stand for "privacy," it turns out that ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=49 Over the past year, as the majority of communities developing health information exchanges struggle to make progress (with a few failing outright), health record banks (HRBs) have received increasing attention as a model for successful community health information infrastructure (HII). There is a growing realization that other approaches do ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=48 Today's CNET story, "AOL, Netflix and the end of open access to research data", describes how two large so-called "anonymized" databases have been re-identified, compromising the privacy of everyone in them. This provides yet another example of why "anonymized" data is a myth -- and reinforces the need to ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=45 One of the key unanswered questions about health information infrastructure over the past several years has been, "Do we have enough trained people to build it?" Over the past year, I've been privileged to have the opportunity to serve as the principal investigator of a research project sponsored ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=44 Today, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation released a new report, Improving Health Care: Why a Dose of IT May Be Just What the Doctor Ordered.  The report recommends health record banking as the way to develop an effective health information infrastructure. It also recommends four specific ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=43 October 4, 2007 -- Today, Microsoft announced their HealthVault(tm), a secure consumer-controlled repository for health and medical records available to all consumers at no charge. It was described as a consumer-centric approach to addressing fragmentation of health information -- in other words, a health record bank. Microsoft's recognition ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=42 by William A. Yasnoff, MD, PhD, and Deborah Peel, MD* In a recent editorial, Modern Healthcare argues that the current national health information technology (IT) efforts should be abandoned since they can't succeed unless "the federal government mandates a single healthcare information technology platform for all healthcare providers and heavily subsidizes ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=41 Michael Porter's Support for Health Record Banks Many advocates of health care system reform have been avidly reading Redefining Health Care by Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), which advocates moving to a system of value-based competition based on results. In it, the ... http://williamyasnoff.com/?p=40