Health

Bonus Features – April 14, 2024 – Less than 6 in 10 docs satisfied with electronic access to external immunization info, 68% of nurses are feeling overwhelmed, plus 38 more stories

Welcome to the weekly edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features. This article will be a weekly roundup of interesting stories, product announcements, new hires, partnerships, research studies, awards, sales, and more. Because there’s so much happening out there in healthcare IT we aren’t able to cover in our full articles, we still want to make sure you’re informed of all the latest news, announcements, and stories happening to help you better do your job.

News

The biggest story of the week was that Epic turned off access to certain medical record requests from Particle Health users on the Carequality exchange. “We believe strongly that this unilateral action is a violation of Carequality’s terms and conditions and is sufficiently important to the treatment of patients to address this matter publicly,” Particle Health said in a statement.

Subsequent statements and social media posts, summarized nicely here by Brendan Keeler, indicate the shut-off occurred in response to Particle Health users requesting data without having a legitimate Treatment use case as defined by HIPAA. Entities defined as Business Associates under HIPAA may have been doing this, Keeler said, because Treatment is the only use case for which a response is required. Epic argued the unauthorized requests could compromise the exchange of PHI.

Epic and Particle Health are working on a resolution. The bigger issue seems to be how regulators and HIE entities are going to address other data use cases as defined by HIPAA, such as Payment, Operations, Research, or Patient Request.

Studies

Partnerships

Product News

Company News

Sales

People

If you have news that you’d like us to consider for a future edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features, please submit them on this page. Please include any relevant links and let us know if news is under embargo. Note that submissions received after the close of business on Thursday may not be included in Bonus Features until the following week.

Get Fresh Healthcare & IT Stories Delivered Daily

Join thousands of your healthcare & HealthIT peers who subscribe to our daily newsletter.