Free Republic

Foreign hackers, primarily from Russia and China, are increasingly seeking to steal Americans’ health care records, according to a Department of Homeland Security analyst. Mark Walker, who works in DHS’ Critical Infrastructure Protection Division, told a workshop audience at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that the hackers’ primary motive seems to be espionage. “They’ve been focused on the [Department of Defense] – the military – but now are spreading out into the health care private sector,” Walker said. Early in 2007, a virus was placed on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site, he said, and...

By next June, electronic health record systems will be available that are certified as capable of exchanging data with other providers when standards are decided. They will also meet criteria for basic clinical doctors’ offices functions, said Mark Leavitt, director of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology of Chicago, the nonprofit organization in charge of establishing the certification process. The initial cases for health IT applications are for chronic care management, disease or bioterror surveillance and a personal health record, said John Halamka, chairman of the Health IT Standards Panel and Harvard Medical School CIO. His panel also will...

The Bush administration plans to announce today a long-term plan for modernizing the nation's health care system with information technology, bringing patient records and prescriptions out of the realm of ink and paper and into the computer age. The administration's strategy, presented in a report to be published today, regards the government's role as one of mainly setting goals and working with the private sector to establish product and technology standards so the computer systems of doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacists and insurers can efficiently communicate and share information. The government, according to the report, will also use its formidable buying...

NEW YORK (AP) Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to focus this year on improving health care, beginning with a proposal designed to modernize the sharing of medical information nationwide. The senator, who as first lady presided over a failed effort at health care overhaul, told a gathering of about 100 New York City health care leaders at a Manhattan hospital on Monday that the current system "often seems fragmented, redundant, inefficient and bureaucratic." "Americans need a new, modern, 21st-century version of health care delivery, based on the premise of information in the hands of the right people at the right...