Compliance Issues Top 2012 Healthcare IT Agenda

What could be worse for IT departments than grappling with the issues related to Y2K? Ask a U.S. healthcare provider within the context of its top IT priorities for 2012 and the response may be government-mandated compliance.

"These mandates have been looming for awhile, such as the move from ICD-9 to ICD-10 for diagnosis and procedure coding, which has been delayed repeatedly," says Marianne McGee, senior writer, InformationWeek Healthcare. "It’s a very intensive program requiring an evaluation of all your systems and anything that relates to patient care."

McGee, the author of a 50-page report, the Healthcare IT 2012 Priorities Survey, has documented the challenges facing hospitals and healthcare organizations associated with reform via the HITECH Act. The focus is on managing digital patient data, meeting regulatory requirements, reducing costs and improving quality of care with respect to the top IT priorities of healthcare organizations in 2012.

"Increasingly, healthcare providers will be paid for the overall care of a patient," she says. "The key though [for healthcare providers] is they’ve got to get these electronic health records (EHR) in. You’re not going meet meaningful use requirements from the government unless you do."

Meaningful use-related work is a top priority among participants of the survey. To that end, 61% stated they’ve implemented a comprehensive system from a single vendor in order to comply with EHR requirements.

The report also notes that healthcare providers are hot for mobile computing but are less concerned with security. If there was ever a recipe for catastrophe, this could be it, says McGee. "You’d think there’d be more concern about that and possible security or privacy breaches since the HITECH Act raised the penalties and scrutiny hospitals and doctors would be under if there was a breach," she says.

To that end, the top reason doctors use mobile computing devices is to access patient data, with 82% of respondents stating as much.

"I spoke with one security guy, and he said not only are some organizations late to the table in rolling out these electronic systems, but they haven’t done the valuations of what their security needs are," she says. "They don’t have someone designated to be responsible for where potential breaches could happen."

Interestingly, cloud computing does not rank high on healthcare providers’ IT wish lists. The report found almost half of respondents (43%) have no plans to leverage cloud computing.

That's in stark contrast to the rest of the public and private sectors, which seem to have gone cloud crazy, according to The Fifth Annual State of the Network Global Study by Network Instruments. The most popular method of cloud computing is software-as-a-service (SaaS), which is embraced by 67% of 163 IT professionals surveyed; followed by private cloud computing (49%); infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or public cloud, (32%); and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) (15%).

"Putting patient information on a third-party or public cloud makes them very uneasy," says McGee. "Part of that might be a lack of control as to where these records are; some of it might be unfamiliarity with what cloud computing is exactly."

The Network Instruments study also noted a healthy dose of concern about the organizational risks. The study shows that top challenges to adoption of cloud computing include security, compliance issues, bandwidth capacity and a lack of interoperability with existing applications.

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