e-News July 7, 11

July 7, 2011

July 2011 VOL 3 ISSUE 26


AMIA Education/Events Submit Your Proposal to TBI Summit AMIA and UTHSC Offer Course on HC Interface Design AMIA Pre Symposium Events Begin Oct. 22 Apply for NI Proposal-Writing Assistance Until July 31	Policy & Government Affairs Contribute to AMIA’s Response to Proposed Changes to HIPAA Privacy Rule HHS Is Active in Issues Related to Informatics IOM Hosts Public Health Law Dissemination Workshop NASHP Issues Brief on the Costs of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities CMS Funds Program to Reduce Hospital Readmissions Calendar	Member News Take a Member’s Survey Annual Symposium Keynoter Publishes NIH Vision on Translational Science

Submit Your Proposal to TBI Summit

Shah The Scientific Program Committees (SPCs) for AMIA’s Joint Summits on Translational Science are eager to review exciting proposals that will comprise the next exciting event, scheduled for March 19-23, 2012, in San Francisco. The TBI Summit opens the joint event from March 19-21; the Summit on Clinical Research Informatics follows from March 21-23. A ‘Bridge Day’ of programming connects the two with a day of joined programming. Paper proposals may be submitted until Aug. 19, 2011 for either meeting. Submissions for panels and abstract presentations have an October deadline.

Program Committee Chair Nigam H. Shah, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics Research) at Stanford University says that the TBI Program Committee is looking forward to submissions that include innovative data–centric approaches that compute on large amounts of data to discover patterns and to make clinically relevant predictions that are the forte of Translational Bioinformatics.

In addition, changes in public policy, the availability of large datasets from multiple molecular level measurements, and increasing electronic heath record adoption, coupled with recent advances in natural language processing, access to vast computing infrastructure, sophisticated ontologies, data-mining and machine learning tools have all converged to enable Big Data mining in Translational Bioinformatics.

Four tracks will cover research that takes the field from base pairs to bedside, with an emphasis on clinical implications of mining massive data-sets, and on bridging the latest multimodal measurement technologies with large amounts of healthcare data:

Concepts, Tools and Techniques for Translational Bioinformatics
Integrative Analysis of multi modal measurements
Base pairs to Bedside
Informatics with Big Data

Further details at: www.amia.org/jointsummits2012/tbi-submission

The CRI Summit will be detailed in next week's AMIA e-News.

AMIA and UTHSC Offer Course on HC Interface Design

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston announces its first 10x10 course, “Healthcare Interface Design.” The course begins July 11 and there are just a few days left to register for the newest 10x10 course!

This online interactive course focuses on EMR, human-computer interaction, human factors, and Health IT usability. Students will master fundamental principles and methods in health interface design, learn how to evaluate the usability of existing systems, and how to design new systems with built-in good usability by applying related theories, principles, methodologies and techniques. Register today!

Space still available in both OHSU 10x10 courses:

10x10 in conjunction with the American College of Emergency Physicians—course began June 29, space still available, registration open through July 15.
10x10– Introduction to Biomedical and Health Informatics—course began July 6, space still available.

Also newly open for registration within the 10x10 program:

10x10 with University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB)—course begins August 25.
10x10 with Kansas University Medical Center (KUMC)—course begins August 29.

To view course descriptions or register for any of the above courses, please visit: www.amia.org/education/10x10-courses

AMIA Pre Symposium Events Begin Oct. 22

Each year as biomedical and health informatics grows, as more people are involved, and more collaborative activity develops, the time-frame of AMIA’s Annual Symposium expands! This Fall is no exception. A number of workshops and a consortium have already scheduled their meetings to co-locate with the 2011 Symposium so that as many AMIA members and participants as possible can take advantage of the onsite opportunities to meet, collaborate, and network. See the current list of activities scheduled for Saturday, and Sunday, Oct. 22-23 here.

Apply for NI Proposal-Writing Assistance Until July 31

The 11th International Congress on Nursing Informatics is scheduled for Jun 23-27, 2012, in Montreal. Twenty tracks will cover a range of interests in nursing informatics and a variety of sessions will include papers, posters, panels, theater-style demonstrations, and keynotes and invited plenary speakers. The Congress, sponsored by IMIA’s Special Interest Group on Nursing Informatics and hosted by AMIA, will streaming some content online in Spanish as well as English. Calls for Participation are currently online in French, Spanish, and English. Apply for editorial assistance by July 31 (well in advance of the Aug. 31 submission deadline) to take advantage of help from the Congress’ Editorial Committee. This special feature of the Congress is designed to assist non-native English speakers who wish to fully participate in the submission process. www.ni2012.org

Contribute to AMIA’s Response to Proposed Changes to HIPAA Privacy Rule

Provisions of the HIPAA Privacy Rule Accounting of Disclosures Under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health ACT (HITECH) notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) represent the most significant changes to HIPAA since promulgation of the Privacy Rule in 2002. AMIA is in the process of drafting a response to the NPRM and we still need your help.

The NPRM would require making available to individuals on request a complete listing of not only disclosures of health information made outside of a covered entity (CE) and its business associates (BAs) but also an access report that will show the name of every individual, whether within or without the covered entity’s workforce, that has viewed information in a designated record set for a period of 3 years.

Can your current EHR system do this? If you are in an organization that has multiple information systems, are those systems sufficiently integrated to produce a comprehensive access report across systems? Can you search your EHR by patient name and produce an audit trail of every individual that has viewed or otherwise accessed the record for a period of 3 years? Can your information systems distinguish between a use or access of PHI (within the entity) and a disclosure (the sending to or access by another entity) to the record? To what extent would the generation of an accounting of disclosures or the new access report requirement be an automated process within your system; put differently, how much manual effort would be required?

Answers to these questions are important to you, your organization, and to AMIA and its members.

If you are interested in helping AMIA formulate its response to comments please contact Meryl Bloomrosen, AMIA VP for Public Policy and Government Relations at meryl@amia.org.

HHS Is Active in Issues Related to Informatics

HHS Picks KPMG to Conduct HIPAA Privacy and Security Audits

The Department of Health and Human Services Department (HHS) recently awarded consulting firm KPMG $9 million to assist the HHS Office of Civil Rights with creating an audit program to verify that care providers, health plans, and their business associates adhere to HIPAA privacy and security standards. KPMG will visit and audit up to 150 of these covered organizations by the end of 2012 to make sure they have consistently put their privacy and security policies into practice. Click here to learn more about the contract.

HHS Issues Interim Operating Rules for Electronic Transactions

As part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Congress required the adoption of operating rules for the health care industry with respect to administrative transactions. Section 1104(b)(2) of the ACA directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to adopt a single set of operating rules for such transactions with the goal of creating as much uniformity in the implementation of the electronic standards as possible. The interim final rule adopts operating rules for two Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) transactions: eligibility for a health plan and health care claim status. The rule also defines the term "operating rules" and explains the role of the rules in relation to the adopted transaction standards. HHS is accepting public comment on the interim rule until September 6, 2011. Click here for complete information.

HHS to Host Forum on Utilizing Social Media and Open Data for Public Health

HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response is preparing to host a forum intended to help identify pioneering ways to move from open-source information to actual public health response. The forum will address such questions as "How do we efficiently and effectively manage large volumes of internal and external disparate data sources necessary for situational awareness, rapid decision support, and discover new indicators and warnings of events of public health significance?" The event will occur on July 20, 2011, from 8 am to 5 pm at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (777 North Capitol Street, NE. Washington, D.C., 20002), and the registration deadline is Friday, July 8. Click here for more information.

IOM Hosts Public Health Law Dissemination Workshop

On Thursday, July 14, the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Public Health Strategies to Improve Health will hold a dissemination workshop for its second report, "For the Public's Health: For the Public's Health: Revitalizing Law to Meet New Challenges." This workshop brings together a wide range of stakeholders to discuss the report ideas on implementing the report's recommendations. Click here for full details.

NASHP Issues Brief on the Costs of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities

The National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) has issued a new brief summarizing several States’ experiences in documenting racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care. The brief was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and focuses on Virginia and Rhode Island and the tools, challenges, and strategies States use to measure the costs of health disparities. Click here to read the full report.

CMS Funds Program to Reduce Hospital Readmissions

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has selected The Lewin Group to help reduce the number of hospital readmissions for Medicare beneficiaries, and improve quality and outcomes when patients transition from hospitals to other settings, such as their homes or long-term care facilities. CMS awarded The Lewin Group $2.3 million for the first year of a 5-year program to assist hospitals and community-based organizations participating in the Community-based Care Transitions Program (CCTP). Click here for more details.

Take a Member’s Survey

From time to time, AMIA E-News invites members to send us their news: award announcements, promotions, election into a professional society, or perhaps a grant award. The following item was submitted by AMIA member Diane Van Scoter, with a request:

“I am a PhD candidate at Oregon State University. My research looks at the affect of contextual details of EHR or ERP implementation projects on the project's critical success factors. Each individual implementation project is the information source for one response to the survey.

This research is attempting to show relationships between project characteristics and organizational factors with the project's critical success factors. If this relationship could be proven, future projects would know beforehand where best to focus their attention and resources to have a successful project. All the details of the survey and link are given below.

EHR or ERP Project implementation managers or consulting managers whose projects were/will be completed in calendar year 2011 (+/- 6 months of completion) meet the time-frame requirements for this survey. When you first enter the survey, you will be asked if you fit the requirements. You must respond 'yes' to gain access to the survey.

It is estimated that this survey will take 10 minutes to complete.

Most of the questions are objective. At the bottom of the page is a gauge showing how much of the survey you have completed. Please answer questions with the choice that best fits your situation.

If you do not know the answer to a particular question, leave it blank and continue with the survey.

http://oregonstate.qualtrics.com//SE/?SID=SV_6EV99B7Q8qtSPdi

If you have any questions or comments, you may contact Diane Van Scoter, vanscotd@onid.orst.edu or Toni Doolen, toni.doolen@oregonstate.edu.

If you have questions about your rights as a research subject, please contact the Oregon State University Institutional Review Board (IRB) Human Protections Administrator, OSU Research Office, 541-737-8008, IRB@oregonstate.edu. Thank you for your participation.”

Editor’s note: AMIA is in no way affiliated with the above-noted research and will not be apprised of the survey results or involved in the research outcome.

Annual Symposium Keynoter Publishes NIH Vision on Translational Science

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis S. Collins, who is opening AMIA’s Annual Symposium in Washington, DC, on Oct 23 at 1 pm with a keynote address, articulates NIH’s vision for advancing translational science in a commentary published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine. His commentary provides a detailed description of the scientific goals and functions of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a proposed new entity of NIH that will strive to reengineer the process of developing drugs, diagnostics, and devices.

The field of translational science currently stands at a critical juncture, according to Dr. Collins. In recent years, basic researchers have made tremendous progress in identifying the molecular causes of disease – discoveries that have revealed hundreds of potential new therapeutic targets. However, the rate at which these discoveries are moving from the lab to the clinic has not kept pace, and therapies exist for just 200 of the more than 4,000 conditions with defined molecular causes. Among the problems is that the translational pipeline is full of bottlenecks that slow the process and add expense. NCATS will seek to generate innovative methods and technologies that will enhance the development, testing, and implementation of diagnostics and therapeutics across a wide range of human diseases and conditions with the goal of significantly shortening what currently takes about 15 years from molecular discovery to new therapy.

Read Dr. Collins’ commentary NIH Director’s page: http://www.nih.gov/about/director/index.htm. Provide your feedback to the commentary at http://feedback.nih.gov/index.php/ncats/stm_commentary.