Blog

Before the hustle and bustle of the holiday season settles in, Jack Frost starts to nip at your nose, and you go into your closet for your annual ugly holiday sweater, there’s one thing left to do to stay on the Nice List this year — hang out with Nextech for a digital fireside chat.  

You got into the healthcare field to change patients' lives, not to organize data or respond to cyberattacks. Yet in our digitized world, storing patient data – and protecting that data from cyber threats – is a time-consuming reality. Switching to a cloud-based solution can transform your electronic health records (EHR) and practice management (PM) systems. 

The end-of-year deadline for EHR development companies to comply with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Cures Act certification updates is rapidly approaching and you may be wondering what this means for your EHR vendor and for your practice. 

Fall is upon us, and while we love seeing the foliage, going apple picking, carving pumpkins, and watching college football — Nextech has its eye on something else this coming season: future proofing your practice.  

The Office of Civil Rights announced in early July that they have settled 11 new HIPAA Patient Right of Access cases, bringing the total number to 38 in the past two and a half years and the total fines to over $3,000,000. These cases occur when providers fail to provide patient records to requestors within the 30 days allotted by HIPAA. The largest of the new fines was $240,000 for failure to provide complete records to one patient. Previously the largest fine for one failure was $130,000. 

While a great deal of information has been released on how electronic health records (EHR) will be affected by the Cures Act regulations, there seems to be far less understanding about how the new requirements will affect practices. In this blog article, we will clarify how some of the new requirements will apply to your practice, even if you are not a MIPS participant, as well as how transitioning to the cloud from a server-based system will make complying with these regulations easier for your practice next year and into the future.

HIPAA violations caused by access issues have made news in recent weeks, where current or past employees have abused their access to EHR patient records to snoop on or steal protected health information (PHI). One rather disturbing example of such abuse was uncovered just this week at the Canton, Ohio-based Aultman Health Foundation. In this case, the PHI of roughly 7,300 patients was compromised (including Social Security numbers, health insurance info, home addresses, birthdates and treatment details).

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released a wealth of new guidance and resources for MIPS Promoting Interoperability (PI) measures and program requirements for the 2021 reporting period. These changes are based on the IPPS (or inpatient) rule. However, the guidance released in the IPPS rule is usually mirrored in the outpatient rule, which should be released later this summer. As usual, there is a lot to go through. However, most requirements are being carried over from 2020 so only a handful of changes need to be noted by our readers (have no fear; we’ve already done the grunt work, so you don’t have to).