Federal Push For Electronic Health Records May Make Fraud Easier
USA Today reports on this development. Meanwhile, in other health IT news, The Fiscal Times reports on how hospitals are getting more involved in big data collection.
USA Today: Feds Push Electronic Records That Make Fraud Easier
The federal government is rewarding doctors and hospitals for moving to electronic health records — and will soon punish them if they don't — even though these records currently make it easier for health care providers to defraud government-paid health programs, fraud experts say (O’Donnell, 7/6).
The Fiscal Times: Don’t Eat That Doughnut: Your Doctor Is Watching
Hospitals are now getting in on the game of big data collection by monitoring their patients’ consumer information—like credit card purchases at fast food joints—to identify people with health risks before they walk in the door. And you thought the NSA was a problem. The largest hospital network operating in North and South Carolina, Carolinas HealthCare System, is gathering data on 2 million people to throw into predictive algorithms designed to flag high-risk patients, Bloomberg’s Businessweek first reported (Ehley, 7/3).
