The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) has announced a program that significantly alters how the health care industry assesses security and reports compliance for HIPAA, HITECH, state and other third-party requirements.

The HITRUST CSF Assurance Program addresses the challenges with the historically proprietary process by providing health care organizations and their business associates with a common approach to manage security assessments that creates efficiencies and contains costs associated with multiple and varied assurance requirements.

The program leverages the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF), a comprehensive security framework that incorporates the existing security requirements of health care organizations, including federal, state, third party (e.g., PCI and COBIT) and other government agencies (e.g., NIST, FTC and CMS). With the broad adoption of the CSF, HITRUST is now able to provide health care organizations and their business associates with a streamlined compliance process and the guidance and tools that ensure a consistent and incremental approach to assessing and reporting compliance to multiple constituents.

"The current method of measuring and reporting compliance is fraught with rampant inconsistencies and tremendous waste of time and resources, all of which work against the goals of health care reform from both an efficiency and information protection perspective," said Daniel Nutkis, chief executive officer of HITRUST. "The confirmation of the need for a new approach is evident in the fact that so many health care organizations are already requiring or encouraging their business associates to participate in the CSF Assurance Program. In addition, we are seeing many business associates proactively take part in the program prior to a request being made."

Utilization of the CSF Assurance Program allows organizations to perform a single assessment against the requirements of the CSF and report the results to various constituents, reducing the time, costs and complexities of today's compliance efforts. For organizations that have already adopted the CSF, the program allows them to receive immediate and incremental value through common reporting tools and processes.

"As a leader in health care reform and innovation, the Health Information Partnership for Tennessee (HIP TN) is working with HITRUST to adopt the CSF as part of its health information exchange initiatives," said Bob Gordon, chairman of the board for HIP TN. "A single, comprehensive assessment approach would ensure we aren't adding complexity and cost to the health care system, while at the same time enabling the protection of health information. The CSF and the CSF Assurance Program should provide the needed mechanisms to ensure trust in the health care organizations that connect to the state's health information exchanges."

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) has released a draft rules-based mapping from SNOMED Clinical Terms to the International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM). The map was designed to support semi-automated administrative reporting and reimbursement for healthcare services within U.S. healthcare organizations. The NLM seeks users to "test drive" and provide feedback for the map-which will guide the development of related maps.

The draft map consists of approximately 5,000 mappings representing the SNOMED CT terms most commonly used by Kaiser Permanente and the University of Nebraska.  It is designed to support administrative reporting and reimbursement processes originating with data sets where SNOMED CT is the core terminology for clinical descriptive purposes.  It provides a validated concept-based mapping to ICD-9-CM, recognizing that in some selected cases, further processing of ICD-9-CM codes may be required for specialized business applications.

"We strongly encourage testing by people who intend to use the map for the billing use case," said Betsy Humphreys, deputy director of NLM. "The results from this test will inform and influence the development of related maps including SNOMED CT to ICD-10-CM [International Classifications of Diseases, 10th revision, Clinical Modification] and ICD-10-PCS [International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision, Procedure Coding System]."

ClaimTrust, a not-for-profit hospital and an affiliate of Jordan Health Systems located in Plymouth, MA, has selected ClaimTrust InSight Denials and is now using the complete InSight Revenue Cycle Solutionproduct suite.

The InSight Revenue Cycle Solution is a web-based, fully hosted product suite designed to target key points in the revenue cycle to ensure that hospitals can most efficiently collect all of the revenue to which they are entitled. The suite of products improves workflow by identifying and eliminating errors and by finding unbilled procedures and services.

Overall, ClaimTrust's suite is enhancing revenue-cycle performance at Jordan Hospital by exposing the most vital areas of the revenue cycle that have the greatest impact on the hospital's bottom line.

"Our decision to use InSight Denials as our denial management tool came down to our existing relationship with ClaimTrust," said Janet Wright, Director of Patient Accounts at Jordan Hospital. "We are long-time customers of ClaimTrust's medical necessity, compliance, and claim editing products, and they have consistently added value and expertise to our revenue cycle management process. By implementing the InSight Denials tool, we plan to improve our workflow by eliminating several manual processes. This tool gives us the real-time data we need, while providing integrated workflow functions to not only fix our denials, but also prevent them from happening again."

InSight Denials analyzes, tracks, and trends denial data to uncover the root causes leading to denials and provides best practices to fix them. It also identifies unpublished rules and recommends fixes for individual denied claims, while helping to identify and implement process improvements to permanently prevent specific denial types.

Saint Francis Hospital, a 155-bed full-service community care hospital in Charleston, WV, has selected the complete eWebHIM suite of medical records workflow technology from eWebHealth, the leading provider of electronic workflow solutions for medical records, as its complete electronic legal health record (e-LHR) solution.

As a divested HCA hospital, Saint Francis needed a medical records workflow solution that would easily interface with its HCA Meditech health information system.

"Saint Francis was looking to expand its health IT capabilities while extending its investment in its current technology," said George Abatjoglou, CEO of eWebHealth. "With our years of experience interfacing eWebHealth's technology with all variations of Meditech environments, we were able to meet Saint Francis' interoperability challenge. As we look ahead, we look forward to working with more members of the HCA IT community to help these hospitals realize the full benefits of our technology suite, including meeting green healthcare goals and revenue cycle improvements."

Saint Francis is implementing the full eWebHIM suite, a fully digitized legal health record with built in HIM workflows in an effort to modernize and improve internal processes. Utilizing eWebHIM's secure, remote access functionality, physicians and staff will now have the flexibility to work remotely and access critical patient information where they need it and when it is needed. As eWebHIM allows multiple authorized users to work simultaneously, physicians, case managers, nurses and staff will no longer need to wait to access or share critical patient information, which eliminates the bottleneck waiting for charts.

Saint Francis Hospital will be using the full eWebHealth suite--a comprehensive medical record workflow solution delivered via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, for real-time, remote record access; rapid implementation; and low cost of deployment.

A-Life Medical, Inc., the provider of computer-assisted coding (CAC) products and services to the healthcare industry, announced today that it has unveiled its new Web site at www.alifemedical.com.

The new Web site reflects the company's broad range of computer-assisted coding products and services while highlighting its proprietary and patented Natural Language Processing (NLP) LifeCode technology, which serves as the platform for all its coding solutions. A-Life is the only computer-assisted coding company that owns its technology and possesses a patented NLP coding engine.

The new, user-friendly site also includes various case studies and scientific papers emphasizing the benefits of CAC and NLP.

Medsphere Systems Corporation announced recently that New Jersey's 328-bed Hoboken University Medical Center (UMC) will implement Medsphere's OpenVista electronic health record (EHR) solution to affordably digitize patient records and improve clinical outcomes through automated patient care.

Hoboken UMC becomes the newest participant in the Health care Open Source Ecosystem, where clinicians, administrators, and other hospital staff share and learn best practices for improving patient care from other OpenVista users.

Hoboken UMC was acquired by the city of Hoboken in 2007 and has since engineered a remarkable financial recovery culminating with the selection of OpenVista as the key to federal financial assistance. Hoboken UMC will fully and meaningfully deploy OpenVista by summer 2010 and become eligible for financial incentives as outlined by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

OpenVista is the commercialized version of the VistA EHR, which was created, funded and developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and credited with helping turn the agency into a national leader in quality patient care.

"As effective care providers, we look to continually demonstrate our leadership in the health care industry and the communities we serve," said Spiros Hatiras, CEO of Hoboken UMC. "Implementing a proven solution such as OpenVista demonstrates Hoboken UMC's commitment to the best possible clinical care with a constant eye on return on investment. We evaluated all the available EMR solutions and selected OpenVista based on the system's track record and Medsphere's commitment to helping us achieve financial support from the federal government."

Patti Reisinger, HIM Director at Community Medical Center in Missoula, MT, was chosen in a random drawing at the recent AHIMA Convention in Grapevine, TX. The prize is a one-year lease for a Prius Hybrid. Ms. Reisinger's entry was one of several hundred submitted throughout the contest.

EDCO Group, Inc chose the Prius Hybrid prize to complement their initiative to "Solve the Hybrid Record Challenge" for hospitals and clinics. The message references the industry-wide struggle to manage documents living in disparate paper and electronic environments. When AHIMA attendees stopped by EDCO's booth at this year's AHIMA convention, they were greeted with software and services to eliminate the need to manage a hybrid environment.

In her two years at Community Medical, Ms. Reisinger has come to fully understand the hybrid record struggle. Her department manages early microfilm and fiche, four years of scanned inpatient records, multiple years of electronic outpatient files, and a file room full of paper inpatient charts going back to 2007. She continues work with EDCO to help her prepare for the pending EHR scheduled for implementation during 2010-2011.

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) has announced the creation of a Diversity Business Roundtable for Health IT to enable businesses owned by minorities, women and veterans the opportunity to advocate, collaborate, network and grow as the health IT market prepares for rapid expansion over the next decade. 

"HIMSS has long offered educational and other resources to support our members' growth, and we're pleased that we can now offer a home for diverse enterprises to take advantage of those resources and share strategies to develop their businesses," said HIMSS President and CEO H. Stephen Lieber, CAE.

"The health IT business community has an unprecedented opportunity to make an impact with innovative solutions and services, job growth, and overall transformation of the health industry," said co-chair Peggy McShane. "Business leaders understand that this fundamental change can only occur when there is collaboration and partnership, which diversity-owned businesses deliver every day. The launch of the Roundtable could not have come at a better time."

HIMSS has a wide range of resources to help its Corporate members capitalize on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding and other opportunities to grow their businesses, and invites entrepreneurs who want to be part of the healthcare transformation to join in the inaugural conference call of the Diversity Business Roundtable on Nov. 13 and to take part in networking events at HIMSS10 in Atlanta, March 1-4, 2010.