The latest ICD-10 coding sets illustrate the growth of data, as these sets are more than three times the number of codes available under ICD-9. Because of the increase of medical codes and the ever-rising amount of patient data, the federal government is looking for better options and regulations with regard to the influx of healthcare information.

Today, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has released the proposed nationwide health information network rules for public comment, according to Mary Mosquera's article in Healthcare IT News. The public has 30 days to offer their views and opinions before the commenting period ends.

The nationwide health information network rules include the policies that allow for health information to be securely exchanged online as well as across healthcare organizations. ONC is interested in finding methods for clarifying the readiness of the national adoption of health information exchanges. This includes discovering whether a national validation process would impact states and local regulations of the health information network.

"ONC seeks help on a range of topics, including the creation of a voluntary program under which entities that enable electronic health information exchange could be validated based on meeting ONC-established 'conditions for trusted exchange.' ONC also wants to hear views about the scope and requirements included in the initial conditions for trusted exchange and processes used to revise them over time," Mosquera writes for the news source.

With the proper medical consulting services, healthcare providers can adopt the advice given by healthcare IT consulting companies to better implement health IT in regards to a health information exchange.

Healthcare IT News agrees, as this news source details an article on the importance of customer support within information technology. Michelle McNickle of Healthcare IT News interviewed Sonal Patel, vice president of client services at Corepoint Health, and Cathy Wickern, system analyst at Highline Medical Center, on specific ways to create efficient customer support in healthcare IT.

Patel explains that a well-informed support staff is a necessity in this endeavour. It is vital for a customer service representative to be knowledgeable about the services a vendor provides as well as the ins and outs of the healthcare industry. Next, Patel discussed the importance of responsiveness. The key to resolving disputes and providing solutions for IT issues is to respond quickly and efficiently.

"After the initial response to the request, the support team should stay in regular contact with the client until the problem is resolved to the customer's satisfaction, without exception," Patel told the news source. "Empower your team to take complete ownership of the situation, to the point of resolution."

For the customer, Patel recommends using vendor's support services, contacting current customers and reading consumer feedback before purchasing any health IT products.

She also discussed how important it is to be able to respond during emergencies. Some customers will be calling in the middle of an emergency and, for a healthcare professional, this could mean a life or death situation. Being able to solve a problem within 15 to 30 minutes is a necessary skill for such a job.

In the midst of health IT implementation, medical providers may need extra customer support. In such situations, speaking to healthcare management consultants offering healthcare IT consulting services could prove vital.

Mobilisafe, a provider of mobile risk management strategies, released research that shows that 71 percent of SMB mobile gadgets encompass high severity operating system design and application weaknesses. In fact, this report illustrated that high severity exposure is seen every 1.6 days on mobile devices, which is four times faster than the 2011 rate of new security threats, according to Gaebler Ventures.

However, the report cites that owners of small and midsize businesses do not lack awareness of security issues with Bring Your Own Device or company-owned mobile software policies. The main issue is that these companies do not have standardized mobility regulations across their departments.

"We now have definitive data that SMBs [small and medium-sized businesses] are exposed to vulnerability risk from mobile devices being used for work. Approximately 70% of devices with severe vulnerabilities can have their risks remediated by applying firmware updates recommended automatically by our product," Giri Sreenivas, CEO of Mobilisafe, told the news source.

Due to the lack of standardization of mobile devices, a significant number of small and midsized businesses are vulnerable to computer viruses along with security attacks that could steal private company data. The study also indicates that by implementing the latest firmware, facilities could reduce viral threats by up to four times.

Healthcare providers that are looking to eliminate potential security issues should consider speaking to healthcare management consultants with expertise in healthcare IT consulting.

Mostashari urges patients and healthcare practitioners to seek medical data at any point it may be relevant, especially while making important medical decisions. Patient advocacy plays a vital role in health information exchange, according to Mostashari.

While patient advocacy impacts HIEs, Mostashari states that healthcare information technology can be used to lower the cost of care, enhance quality of patient care and improve the patient-doctor relationship. Specifically, electronic health records can enable patients to manage their medical conditions. Software project management is a vital topic to consider in today's medical practice as the health IT industry has achieved many successes to improve the overall standard of care.

Mostashari also explains that, because medical terminology and latest practices may be confusing to the consumer, patient advocates can provide the information necessary to fill in the gaps of healthcare knowledge. Such professionals would be a vital part to the adequate performance of an HIE system.

However, today's healthcare system does not provide the necessary patient advocacy that Mostashari refers to. Lindsey Kroll, a director of performance improvement at Arizona Health Care Cost Containment, was determined to change this lack of healthcare support and developed the Enable Your Care organization last year.

"While I do believe in health information exchange and health information technology, until states can get this functionality up and running, our advocates have become little miniature walking HIEs," Kroll told Government Health IT. "They are the liaison between every single component of a patient’s healthcare journey."

Healthcare providers interested in improving HIE systems for their patients should speak to medical practice management consulting firms with experience in healthcare IT consulting.

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act made a big impact on the high number of venture capital funding. In the first quarter of 2012, 46 venture capitalists invested in health IT, as more medical practices have embraced software project management in order to gain incentives under the HITECH Act for meeting meaningful use regulations.

"We are seeing significant momentum in terms of private venture capital funding flowing into the HIT sector, and a robust M&A environment is providing investors and the industry with liquidity and viable exit options," Raj Prabhu,a healthcare IT expert, told Government Health IT. "Since the first quarter of 2010, M&A transactions have outpaced VC funding transactions by almost two to one, a positive sign for the industry."

Health information management companies gained the most funds at $103 million, followed by personal health records firms that obtained $32 million. Public health records businesses and clinical intelligence companies handled four deals each while clinical decision support firms had three and EMR companies had two deals.

Mergers and acquisitions also took a stronghold in the healthcare information technology field. Thirty-four mergers and acquisitions amounted to a total of $653 million. Health information management companies took the highest number of mergers and acquisitions, standing at fifteen.

Hospitals, medical practices and other healthcare organizations considering implementing electronic medical records or e-prescribing software to meet meaningful use requirements may benefit from healthcare IT consulting services.

According to Government Health IT, enhancing performance criteria through the federal government could bring electronic medical records onto a countrywide level while the potential overthrow of the healthcare reform law could hurt the health IT industry.

In regards to this potential overthrow of the healthcare reform law, James Wieland, president at Ober, Kaler, Grimes & Shriver - a law firm in Baltimore, Maryland - states, "It would certainly prevent or delay what I would see as a major step forward in the continued importance of health IT and its continued agility particularly in quality and performance measurement."

The five aspects of healthcare IT that can be affected if the Supreme Court overthrows the Affordable Care Act are:

1. Quality reporting
2. Quality measure development
3. Availability of de-identified Medicare data
4. Specific health IT standards and regulations
5. Administrative simplification

Quality reporting leads to better care coordination, chronic disease management and best practices to determine quality of care. Losing such standards could negatively impact patient care. Quality measure development influences the public health arena as well as health plans and medical providers.

The third aspect the health IT community could lose is tied to measuring the practices of qualified accountable care organizations and other facilities. The fourth point provides individuals with information on their eligibility for federal and state programs while the last point modifies certain HIPAA standards to minimize clerical duties for healthcare professionals.

Healthcare organizations looking for healthcare IT consulting services should consider speaking to healthcare management consultants.

Thirty-one experts from the healthcare industry contributed to the "Valuing Healthcare: Improving Productivity and Quality" report. The task force members used a different approach when attempting to solve questions on healthcare reform, according to Government Health IT.

"Rather than look for a 'one-shot-fix' solution, the task force focused on incremental reforms that cumulatively can both reduce costs and enhance the value of healthcare delivered to Americans, regardless of whether and how the Affordable Care Act is implemented," Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, told Government Health IT. "The underlying thread to the recommendations is leveraging big medical data."

The report encourages sharing data among research centers, medical practices, pharmacies, insurance firms, radiology centers and other health-related facilities. Along with sharing data, the report recommends for the federal government to provide incentives for new record-keeping professionals to assemble and analyze information in order to discover new treatments.

Another point the report makes is for the government to fund more research with teams from multiple institutions. By making larger grants, participants from different research organizations can come together to study more novel problems with a larger impact on society.

The Kauffman report also recommends altering medical malpractice management systems to simplify newly approved medication regulations, and eliminate various restrictions on health insurance premiums.

Healthcare providers having trouble with accessing big data and cutting healthcare costs should consider partnering with healthcare consulting firms offering medical practice management consulting.

There are six specific steps the "Transforming Healthcare through Better Use of Data" study suggests when attempting to improve data use and obtain a larger value from patient information. These steps are:

1. Data Governance
2. Data Acquisition
3. Data Sharing
4. Data Standardization
5. Data Integration
6. Analytics

The report outlines the importance of creating a data governance plan before beginning to work with the data. This includes figuring out how to collect, keep, secure and curate large data sets.

Unstructured or semi-structured data coming from medical homes, caregivers and patients themselves increase the need for adequate processing of large data sets. Also, the report urges the use of medical codes and taxonomies for demographic sections of data.

For medical facilities looking to implement Accountable Care Organizations or a patient-centered medical home, proper data-sharing becomes a vital aspect of managing patient information. The report details that virtualizing specific data from various facilities such as in the form of cloud computing could enable better data sharing between medical providers.

Since a major problem with sharing data between healthcare centers across the country is the lack of common data models, the need for standardizing data should become the central focus of medical providers, according to the report.

"Data integration is the merger of data from internal and external data sources into a single patient-centric data structure optimized for analysis," the report states. "Once all of the other building blocks are aligned - from governance to standardization - organizations can apply analytics tools to glean meaningful and actionable insight from their data."

Medical providers that need assistance with using patient data adequately should consider partnering with healthcare consulting firms with expertise in medical project management.

The new model is outlined in the CHIDS HIE Evaluation Framework and it provides some basic guidelines for analyzing Regional Health Information Organizations across the country. There are five main parts to assessing HIE systems. These are: sustainability of the business model, decision-making elements and overall structure, community involvement, technology and reliability of the system. This study was developed by P. Kenyon Crowley, associate director of CHIDS, Ritu Agarwal, professor of information systems, and Sunil Mithas, associate professor.

"Much of the country has a long way to go to getting electronic health records implemented and able to share health information seamlessly," Crowley told Healthcare IT News. "This work is vital – the development of effective and sustainable HIEs enables better quality of care. With shared patient health information, clinicians can better manage and coordinate care, which improves patient safety, reduces redundancy and spurs quality and efficiency."

The CHIDS organization also analyzed Washington D.C.'s primary HIE system, the DC Regional Health Information Organization, and found it to be among the top 20 percent of HIE systems in the country. CHIDS also provided recommendations to improve sustainability for this system.

Medical providers looking to improve their HIE systems and better serve their patients should consider partnering with healthcare consulting firms specializing in healthcare IT consulting.

Questionnaires were sent to doctors asking for their opinion on electronic health records and other healthcare topics. Total responses tally up to 5,105 and the results are based on all 50 states.

Oregon came in at number one, with 41 percent of physicians implementing EHR systems. Georgia, Florida, Washington and Virginia followed, with 39 percent, 37 percent, 35 percent and 34 percent of physician EHR use observed, respectively.

Exactly 30 percent of survey takers indicate that they have already implemented an EHR system that meets meaningful use regulations and another 14 percent will purchase an EHR system that meets meaningful use requirements within the next three years. Only 17 percent of surveyed physicians have no future plan to adopt EHR technology.

Over 20 percent of respondents use electronic billing and scheduling software, but these systems lack vital features of EHR technology. Another 8 percent use only a hospital-based EHR system, according to the study.

However, some doctors state that EHRs are of little benefit to the medical practice due to their increasing costs and reduced time spent on building a relationship with a patient, according to Healthcare IT News. Some are claiming that government mandates force them into EHR use before they are ready for such advanced equipment.

Nonetheless, EHR technology is on the rise and the federal government seems to be set on implementing health IT within the medical industry. Providers looking to adopt EHR systems may benefit from the expertise of meaningful use consultants with experience in software project management.