Hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies face intense pressure to electronify medical information and health histories. This pressure is comprised of both a very big stick and a very big carrot.
The stick comes in the form of proliferating state and Federal laws mandating the safekeeping of electronic medical records (EMR). Last year, the hospital that treated the mother and babies in the famous “Octomom” case was unable to prevent unauthorized access to their medical records by the hospital’s own employees. California regulators fined the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower a total of $437,500 for failure to prevent just two instances of unauthorized access. Other prominent institutions, such as UCLA Medical Center, have suffered newsworthy failures to protect EMR information in the cases of Farah Fawcett, Britney Spears, Maris Shriver, and others. In addition to the financial damage such failures incur, hospitals are deeply concerned about the effects of adverse publicity on their reputation and about incurring big expenses in related legal actions.
The carrot comes in the form of a huge Federal earmark for $19 billion in stimulus money to incent the development and implementation of electronic medical records (EMR) technology.
InterComputer is working within the health care industry to address two major market requirements:
1. The need to control access to EMR in compliance with applicable Federal and state laws
2. The need to securely communicate and exchange documents among hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies
The InterComputer InterOperating System (IOS) is fully compatible with all major EMR solutions and applications and fully insured against loss due to cybercrime of any kind within the system. Its advanced user identity, authority delegation management, and secure messaging technologies, can absolutely prevent the kind of incidents that have proved so costly to Kaiser’s bottom line. IOS also delivers automated compliance with both HIPAA and SarbOx regulatory requirements.
To learn more about InterComputer’s EMR capability, click here.
Tags: EHR, EMR, InterComputer IOS, lawsuit, medical records