Healthcare.Gov Insurance Exchange Allows 3rd Party Access to Your Data

Electronic Health Records are becoming the 'Black Hole" of  Digital Health IT.

Enormous amounts of data are  orbiting the the universe  ready to be annihilated or swept into unknown hands.

Those who  know are warning what is coming and what is already happening.

Ducknet, published by Barbara Duck,, a well known algorithm pundit warns us,

"There are a number of 3rd parties connected to the website (Health.gov) and they can mine and secure data just like any other website.  The data once secured can be queried and re-matched and sold.  This is a huge oversight from the government.  Here's a clip from one of the number of articles on the web on this topic... , MORE......

"It works like this: When you apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, dozens of data companies may be able to tell that you are on the site. Some can even glean details such as your age, income, ZIP code, whether you smoke or if you are pregnant. 

HealthCare.gov contains embedded connections to multiple data firms that the administration says generate analysis to improve the consumer experience. Officials say outside firms are barred  from using the data to further their own business interests." 

Do we know if these 3rd parties sell this information, of course not.  Breaking the law today with computerized algorithms is an area where law enforcement has been very weak as so many don't understand it.  Would it benefit HHS to know the license numbers (if this was in place) of those who sell data and connect to the Healthcare.Gov site?  You bet it would.  

 Scroll on down and watch with the Killer videos and links

 VIEW the  videos and links 

Does Your doctor share your data with a Health Information Exchange?

What Happens to your EHR records when a building or other infrastructure fail ?

A recent post on Healthcare IT news brings to the fore-front about trusting, but verifying what EHR vendors promise.

While electronic record keeping gives great advantage in operations; at the same time a small failure quickly expands to total systems outage.

A recent 'blackout' of a hospital's  medical records points out the inherent weaknesses of a 'systemic failure' of an offsite data source providing infrastructure for a medical or hospital practice.

A Northern California hospital has acknowledged that its electronic health record system went dark for about a week, which resulted in clinicians unable to access patient medical records and even having to postpone serious medical treatments. 

The two-hospital health system recently implemented the McKesson Paragon platform, but Chason emphasized that the EHR system was not at fault. Rather, HVAC units contained in an off-site data center were to blame after one burned out, and the other overheated soon after. Rideout Health officials did not respond to Healthcare IT News' inquiries for further details on the incident.

Who's at fault?                                   

Cloud Servers

Despite Chason assuring reporters patient medical care was notaffected by the outage, he did acknowledge it resulted in many patients having to postpone their radiation treatments. What's more, clinicians had no electronic access to portions of their patients' records. "We talked about whether to transport and transfer patients for a long period of time," Chason was quoted in the Appeal Democrat. "There were some records that were not accessible for a period of time, but we tried to get them as quickly as we knew about them."

A patient had a nuclear heart stress test at the health system when the computer outage occurred, and as a result the test didn't get to her cardiologist until two weeks later. After examining the test results, Ferreira said clinicians determined she potentially suffered a minor heart attack and would require additional cardiac intervention efforts. This EHR outage is far from an isolated incident.

Just in August 2013, the 24-hospital Sutter Health system in Northern California reported that its $1 billion Epic electronic health record crashed due to a software glitch in the system that manages user access to the EHR. The outage lasted an entire day, with nurses saying they were unable to access medication orders and patient allergies, among other things. 

Then there was the IT network failure at the three-hospital Martin Health System in Florida, which in January 2014 reported its $80 million Epic EHR also went dark, an outage that lasted nearly two days. Clinicians at the hospital had to resort to manual charting and documentation.

Setback for Sutter, $1B EHR goes black

‘Meds were not given for the entire day for many of the patients.’

The 24-hospital Sutter Health system in Northern California was the talk of the town late August after a software glitch rendered its $1 billion Epic electronic health record system inaccessible to nurses and clinical staff throughout all Sutter locations. 

On Aug. 26 at approximately 8 a.m., the Epic EHR system failed, at which time nurses, physicians and hospital staff had no access to patient information, including what medications patients were taking or required to take and all vital patient history data, according to reports from the California Nurses Association, part of National Nurses United, the largest nurses union in the U.S. 

"Many of the families became concerned because they noticed the patients were not getting their medications throughout the day,” 

Predictive Analytics: Mayo Clinic and Apervita

It did not take long for analytics to become commercialized as a big business. Perhaps this is the first step in developing Preferred Patterns in developing algorithms. Leaders such as the Mayo Clinic, and perhaps other university centers will have a sweepstakes of algos for outcomes and big data in health care.  That would be wonderful and would save the rest of us from pouring limited resources into Medicare’s edicts about outcomes. Who will be next ?

On Wednesday, Mayo Clinic announced it will commercialize its analytics, publishing and sharing algorithms with healthcare enterprises to improve patient outcomes. Utilizing Apervita’s secure self-service health analytics platform, healthcare enterprises can leverage Mayo Clinic’s robust portfolio of health analytics to improve patient care. Mayo Clinic will join other prominent health institutions in the growing Apervita analytics community of providers who are already utilizing the platform.

Benefits of Sharing Algorithms

Mayo Clinic’s decision to offer its algorithms through Apervita empowers health enterprises everywhere to leverage Mayo’s portfolio of algorithms, which includes a large number of specialties, such as cardiovascular, pulmonology, and oncology. “At Mayo, one of our most scalable assets is our knowledge. We have found sharing knowledge significantly improves the efficacy of care delivery, improving quality and driving down costs. Sudden cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death among adults over the age of 40,” said Paul Friedman, MD Vice-chair, Cardiovascular Medicine, and Director, Cardiac Electronic Implantable Device Lab at Mayo Clinic in a statement. For example, Mayo is sharing an algorithm that can automatically identify patients at risk for sudden cardiac arrest for an appropriate consultation.

How It Works

Apervita empowers health professionals and enterprises to capture and share health knowledge, allowing them to easily author, publish and use health analytics, such as algorithms, quality and safety measures, pathways, and protocols. The Apervita health analytics market liberates this knowledge and makes it readily accessible so that every health professional can take advantage of it. Health enterprises no longer need to hard code analytics into their existing systems or buy siloed analytic systems. By selecting trusted analytics from globally renowned institutions, health enterprises can readily improve their workflow, inserting insight where it is most needed.

Key Benefits

Example uses of Apervita’s health analytics market for providers include:

- Create a patient safety dashboard. Use your own measure data and choose public measures from the Apervita marketplace. Share it with your safety taskforce.

- Using the latest medical algorithms, providers can detect readmission risks across your populations. Monitor high risk patients at admission and discharge, by disease.

- Quickly identify outliers and deteriorating patients. Providers can choose evidence-based algorithms from the marketplace or create your own. Take action early to avoid unnecessary harm.

Other companies have taken note of opportunities for analytics in  health care.

Rock Health: How Predictive Analytics Impacts Patient Care

Rock Health’s latest report, Predictive Analytics: The Future of Personalized Health Care explores this question and how the overabundance of big data and widespread availability of tools has catalyzed the growth of predictive analytics in healthcare. The scope of the report only includes companies using algorithms to directly impact patient care such as clinical decision support, readmission prevention, adverse event avoidance, disease management and patient matching.

Key Findings

Personalizing care through predictive analytics represents a significant opportunity to reduce costs in the healthcare system. Key findings of the report include:

- Of the venture-backed companies claiming to use predictive analytics, nearly three quarters of them are focused on just healthcare professionals and practically ignore patients.

- Healthcare data is expected to exponentially grow from 500 petabytes in 2012 to 25,000 petabytes in 2020 (AMIA). That’s the equivalent of 500 billion four-drawer filing cabinets.

- Most predictive analytics companies continue to leverage clinical and claims data for their algorithms. However, there is an emerging group of companies that are using patient-generated (e.g., digital medical devices and wearables) and patient-reported data to help better predict care.

- Even if we had the technology to address interoperability issues, solve privacy concerns, and process unstructured data, hundreds of thousands of facts influence health – many of which medical science cannot explain.  

Slideshare on Algorithms

- Health outcomes are not instantaneous. Without an effective, closed-feedback loop, algorithms struggle to continue to learn and improve. – Predictive analytics has no value if providers, physicians and patients do not act on these recommendations.  

For more information, see the full report below and register for Rock Health’s live webinar on Thursday where they will explore the details of the report.

The future of algorithms may very well be standardized, so that regional

comparisons would be valid.

Reduce IT Complexity and Improve Utilizations through Convergence

Traditional IT  operations have been historically difficult to manage and maintain. Typically viewed as an infrastructure-centric center that includes maintenance costs and complicated applications. Digital Health Space envisions the electronic  health record that enables work flow  by focusing on services that improves productivity. IT should be elastic, nimble, modular, integrated, streamlined, high-quality, automated and software-defined.

Health care providers,  hospitals, and other support personel are faced at times with overwhelming advances in technology.

WEBINAR  (on demand)

This webinar has been approved by HIMSS for up to 1 contact hour of continuing education credit toward renewal of the CPHIMS credential.

Health care personel tasked with evaluating and selecting solutions must critically evaluate software that minimally disrupts established workflow. Ethnology requires further project management for modifying established workflow for change if it is determined the new application is cost-effective and improves efficiency in the long run. Disruption may decrease efficiency for three to six months depending on it's compmlexity and learning curve.

Unfortunately deficits in software do not become apparent until after implementation. Contract negotiations must include provision for software modifications (patches) and the limitations imposed by vendors. 

The Internet of Things may also provide links from the EHR or other applications as an add-on