EMR and Privacy

I’ve recently engaged Dr. Deborah Peel, Founder of the Patient Privacy Rights organization, in a number of really interesting discussions around patient privacy. For those who aren’t familiar with Dr. Peel, she’s the most passionate patient privacy advocate in the world. While I don’t always agree with Dr. Peel’s views on patient privacy, I always love to hear what she has to say and I think we need more people like her in healthcare to make the case for something they think is really important.

With this said, Dr. Peel recently told me about a Wall Street Journal Experts chat she was on where they discussed EMR and privacy. You can see the video embedded below (Dr. Salwitz had sound issues, so after the intro you might want to skip to 4 minutes):

Dr. Peel also told me about an ONC event that she’ll be attending to talk about a really important topic: Patient IDs. When you’re talking privacy, the patient ID discussion is a very important one. Here’s the info if this is a discussion that you think is important. Plus, if enough people register, they’ll stream the event for everyone to watch online.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) invites organizations with an interest in improving the accuracy of electronic patient identification and matching to attend a meeting in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2013.
The Patient Matching Stakeholder Meeting will be held from 10:00 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. at Patriot Plaza III, 355 E Street, SW, Washington, D.C. 20024.
Registration is now open –
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1iqgChkhhXj-Jpx99jfI7No9I_RuzviNEN6bsyuHgxdU/viewform

The agenda will include:
– Updates on the recent industry environmental scan on patient identification and matching, conducted by Audacious Inquiry on behalf of ONC;
– Sharing of initial recommendations for improving patient matching rates, derived from input from a wide range of stakeholders;
– Interactive discussions around emerging ideas to improve the processes of data collection, data validation, and other ways to help ensure accurate patient identification and matching, as electronic exchange of health information increases across the country; and
– Opportunities for all sectors to provide further feedback, including: large and small health care organizations, software and hardware health IT vendors, federal agencies, patient safety and privacy advocates, associations, and state and regional health information organizations.

We are exploring the possibility of providing webinar/videoconferencing capabilities to expand participation. Please register now, even if you plan to attend remotely, and we will follow up with more information.

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.

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