EHR Mandate, HIPAA Privacy Violations, EHR Companies, Benefits of EMR and EHR and more

As most long time readers know, I’m a bit of a stats fanatic when it comes to my website. I love to see the internal numbers of what’s happening on my website. In fact, you might remember that I’ve wondered why I’m not as interested in my “health numbers.” Although, I actually am interested. I love getting my cholesterol value after giving blood. I’m using my scale more and more (with sad, but motivating results). The real challenge is that we need personal health data to be as easily created and tracked as website health data, but I digress.

I thought it would be fun to look over the past 3 months on EMR and HIPAA and see which pages and posts are the most popular. Plus, I’ll add some commentary or updates on each.

The most visited posts in the last 3 months was my post on the 2014 EHR Mandate. When you look at the searches I get referred to EMR and HIPAA, you can see why this page has been so popular. I’m actually really glad that doctors get this page since it does a great job describing how there isn’t an EHR mandate. Although, there are incentives, penalties and reasons why you might want to implement an EHR. I’m sure that post has done a lot to dispel the myth of the EHR mandate.

The next most popular post is my very old post on HIPAA Privacy Violations & HIPAA Lawsuits. I expect the reason it’s so popular is that many clinics are worried about HIPAA and any issues they may have with it. Plus, it’s kind of like a car crash, you can’t resist taking a look to see what’s happened. Those two factors make for great blog reading.

My next two most popular pages are both lists of EMR and EHR companies. The second list is from a post on the overwhelming list of EMR and EHR companies I did back in early 2006, but it’s still amazingly popular. A lot has changed since 2006 in the EHR world. It’s fun to look through the list and see which EHR software is still around and see some old names of companies that are no longer with us. One thing that remains the same is the list of EMR and EHR vendors is still overwhelming. Although, maybe that has changed. The list of EMR and EHR vendors might be more overwhelming today than it was in 2006.

I’m really glad to see that so many people are reading my list of EMR & EHR benefits page. Far too many practices have put on their Meaningful Use blinders that they forget to look at the reasons that physicians were implementing EHR software before the government waived $36 billion in front of their face. There are some guaranteed benefits to EHR including: legibility of patient charts and Accessibility of Charts. It’s hard to put a dollar value on those, but they are incredibly valuable.

Another popular post was about Email Not Being HIPAA Secure. The next most popular post after it is ironically “HIPAA Lawsuit – PHI by Un-encrypted Email.” I think many doctors have appreciated the insight about various technologies and how to satisfy HIPAA. Another in that series is the Texting is Not HIPAA Secure.

The final post I’ll look at in this round up is called Example of EMR Stimulus Medicare Penalties. Those EHR penalties are looming and I think this post provides some good perspective and understanding on how big the EHR penalties are for a practice. Sure, each practice needs to add in their own Medicare numbers, but that’s simple math.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • One more barrier being erected between the patient and the doctor.

    Encrypted email sounds great, but at our hospital close to 50% is never opened by the patient. They think it is fishing or they find it one barrier too many to overcome.

    How many people are hurt by not getting information from their doctor? How many are hurt by unencrypted email? Our problem is not information getting into the wrong hands, it is information not getting into the right hands.

    Patient portals also sound good for the very small percentage of patients who use them. What about the other 80 to 90 % of your patients?

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