Sharon Woods Harris reports: Tazewell County Coroner Dennis Conover said an amendment to the Illinois Prescription Monitoring Program would make investigations into questionable deaths much easier, but a national privacy advocacy group has some concerns. House Bill 3695 would amend the Illinois Prescription Monitoring Program — a database of prescriptions that doctors and pharmacists use…
Get Ready for EHR Failures, But Don’t Blame the Software
Austin Merritt of Software Advice is a proponent of EHR and has written a column that identifies what he sees as major reasons why EHR adoption may fail: Our concern is that the subsidies won’t change healthcare providers’ late adopter mindsets about information technology. Providers may jump at “free software†and try to avoid penalties…
Mayo puts HealthVault on hold, PHR questions linger
Joseph Conn reports: The Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., one of the nation’s premier and best-known healthcare organizations, has yet to deploy the HealthVault personal health record from Microsoft Corp., despite a big-splash publicity notice linking of the two organizations more than a year ago, according to Mayo spokesman Karl Oestreich. The Mayo Clinic, thus, is…
Stimulus bill puts burden on physicians to tell patients of data breach
Karen Caffarini reports: Sending a letter to patients to notify them of a data breach in your office is more than just a nice thing to do — it’s becoming something you must do. The recently passed stimulus legislation — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — includes language that requires any physician…
Tennessee Senate Committee Passes Proposal That Would Allow Greater Restrictions On Abortion
Tennessee’s Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved 6-2 a proposal that would change the state constitution to allow greater restrictions on abortion, the AP/Tennessean reports. Read more in Medical News Today.
Stolen-data trove offers look inside a botnet
Jordan Robertson of the Associated Press reports on what researchers from Prevx found on a Ukrainian web site used as to store data from 160,000 infected computers. What they found included data from a Georgia bank that exposed customer details and credentials for the bank’s wire-transfer system, and data from two states’ systems. Read more.