Posted by Will Hicklen on Thu, Feb 28, 2013 @ 12:40 PM
I'm amazed at the number of healthcare organizations that are completely unaware of the Business Associate Agreement under HITECH. Of those that are aware of the document, further confusion exists as to whether they are required to execute one. Here are some resources to help you determine quickly whether this requirement applies, but you should err on the side of putting one in place with your business partners. They are simple and easy to use and there is nothing objectionable about the terms so long as you and your partners intend to do business the right way.
Here is a brief description of the BAA from from TechTarget and a video from legal experts on the matter below: Under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, a HIPAA business associate agreement (BAA) is a contract between a HIPAA covered entity and a HIPAA business associate (BA). The contract protects personal health information (PHI) in accordance with HIPAA guidelines.
Effective Feb. 18, 2010 in accordance with the HITECH Act of 2009, a BA's disclosure, handling and use of PHI must comply with HIPAA Security Rule and HIPAA Privacy Rule mandates. Under the HITECH Act, any HIPAA business associate that serves a health care provider or institution is now subject to audits by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) within theDepartment of Health and Human Services and can be held accountable for a data breachand penalized for noncompliance.
With these new regulations in mind, a HIPAA business associate agreement should explicitly spell out how a BA will report and respond to a data breach, including data breaches that are caused by a business associate's subcontractors. In addition, HIPAA business associate agreements should require a BA to demonstrate how it will respond to an OCR investigation.
Attorneys Carlos Leyva and Mayra Scheuermann have developed a HIPAA/HITECH Survival Giude, which includes educational resources, model contracts, and a sample Business Associate agreement. Ankota does not endorse this package, but this is a good resource to learn from and the package looks to solve the problems that many of Ankota's readers face.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Aug 06, 2012 @ 09:42 AM
The Home Care Software Geek posts in this blog don't talk about Home Care Nursing Software, Private Duty Telephony, DME Delivery Software, Home Infusion Care Management or the other topics we focus on regularly at Ankota. Instead, these posts are intended to keep our readers up to date with technology trends that might be useful to your agencies, such as social media technologies, mobile devices, and what's happening from the big-boys like Microsoft, Google and Apple.
Back when I started my career, I worked for GE Aerospace (now part of Lockheed Martin) on software that flew and controlled satellites. In my case the satellites circled the earth and we could send new commands to them from the ground for around 1 minute
every two hours. But still, it was a hard engineering problem and when we occaisionally had a failure in the communications or the instructions, the results were measured in big numbers (more than a large home care company makes in a year). I've been out of the aerospace business for quite a long time now (note that I edited and removed the number of years because it made me feel old) but seeing the latest NASA achievement and what went into it gave me pause and prompted me to ask myself what I can learn from it as a home care software developer and what the home care industry can learn from it.
Before going much farther, I'd encourage you to watch this video to see what it required to get the Curiosity Mars Rover to its landing point on Mars. For those of you who don't choose to watch the video, think of it this way:
The entire landing was done without human control 127 million miles away, and they were within 200 meters of their landing zone. To put this in context it’s equivalent to throwing a dart, have it circle the earth 339 times, and then take a right turn by itself and hit a bull’s-eye!
So what can we learn from this? Here are my thoughts:
- Seeing that this is possible inspires me to beleive that there are no home care software challenges that we can't achieve
- It further reminds me that when we have a tough problem to solve with our software, that there are tougher problems out there
- It inspires me to be more perfect with what we do
- But at the same time I'm proud that we can build software with much smaller teams and at a much lower cost in order to make it affordable for small businesses in the home care industry to afford it and benefit from it
- Lastly, and I guess that this one is a little bit strange, but sometimes I think about the sad tragedies that I hear about like September 11th and the recent Aurora Colorado tragedy and those things make me realize that my worst days are not really that bad. It's fun for a change, to be inspired instead by something as awe inspiring as this accomplishment
What do you think?
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Will Hicklen on Tue, Jul 17, 2012 @ 07:27 AM
There is broad recognition that post acute care providers are vital to an effective healthcare delivery system that coordinates care for better outcomes and reductions in avoidable readmissions. The imperitive of Accountable Care is that Primary Care and acute, hospital-based care must coordinate with post-acute care providers to form "ecosystems." These ecosystems will serve as collaboratives that
- Practice evidenced based medicine
- Share both the financial risks and rewards of delivering better outcomes
- Manage chronic conditions proactively
- Support the elderly through Aging in Place and other programs
- Lower the total cost of care.
In the video below, Mary St. Pierre, VP of Regulatory Affairs for the National Association for Home Care and Hospice (NAHC) discusses how clinicians and home care agencies can help to reduce hospitalizations and improve the quality of care for older adults. Click here to view St. Pierr's discusion.
In a related article titled Preventing Rehospitalization: Home Care to the Rescue, Mary Champ explains that "Medicare is going to penalize hospitals that have high readmission rates. Take it to the next step: hospitals are going to be held accountable for what happens once their patients are home." Medicare patients who are re-admitted within 30 days of their discharge will now have a profoundly negative impact on the hospital's finances. "What used to be considered more revenue, inpatient admissions, is going to cost hospitals money starting October 2012, when a Medicare patient is readmitted in less than 30 days," explains Champ.
Further, "Preventing rehospitalization is nothing new for home care agencies. We’ve been held accountable for a while now." Champ adds, "...hospitals will see greater value in improving communication with their home care partners now that their bottom line will be impacted. Making home care services a part of the rule not the exception in discharge planning would seem to be a logical step to address this problem."
Ankota develops technology that organizes providers into ecosystems to manage Care Transitions, helping them Plan, Organize, and Deliver care among all provider types. To learn more about Ankota's Care Transitions Technology, click on the orange button below
Posted by Will Hicklen on Thu, Jul 12, 2012 @ 09:43 AM
A relatively small percentage of cases make up the bulk of expenses in healthcare--and that is true among all payor sources. There is much that can be done to mitigate avoidable readmissions, take care of patients more proactively in their homes, and lower the total overall cost of care. Here is a compelling story as backdrop for the conversation.
This Wall Street Journal article The Crushing Cost of Care illustrates this point dramatically. Using the case of Scott Crawford, who, in 2009, consumed $2.7M in Medicare funded services until he died at the age of 41, author Janet Adamy tells the tragic story of one of Medicare's most expensive beneficiaries in that year. Crawford was only in his 20's when he became sick, qualified for Medicare coverage through the disability, and ultimately received a transplanted heart at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
"We're always going to have patients in the Medicare program that need a disproportionate number of resources," said Jonathan Blum, deputy administrator and director for Medicare. Blum observed about Crawford's case, "A lot of the costs were driven by complications that could have been avoided," and cited an infection that Mr. Crawford aquired as an example.
I am deliberately ignoring any ethical discussion about Mr. Crawford's casefor a number of reasons, including:
1. I am a proponent of organ donation. My own wife's life was extended significantly by a liver transplantation made possible by the generosity of the donor and his surviving family.
2. Mr. Crawford's case is simply an illustration for a disussion about how we care for the sickest and costliest of patients -- and how we can improve both the outcomes and the cost at which we deliver that care.
3. As the leader of a software company that develops technology that helps providers coordinate better care, I am focused on dramtically improving healthcare delivery models.
Mr. Crawford's case is extreme, but is a good catalyst for discussion. There are millions more patients consuming healthcare services that are poorly organized and delivered. Whether it is a patient's failure to manage his own medications or chronic condition that results in an emergency room visit, or better coordinated therapy plan following knee replacement surgery that would rehabiliate the patient faster and stronger, it is clear that more can be done. What I find more interesting than the article itself is the interview with the author, Janet Adamy of the Wall Street Journal, which you can see in the video above. Maybe this is the real discussion and Mr. Crawford simply serves to make the lesson more personal.
Aknota's technology is used by providers of all types, including hospitals, ACOs and post acute care providers to better coordinate and deliver care upon discharge, and enable programs like Patient Centered Medical Home, Care Transitions Initiatives, and Community Based Care. To learn more about Ankota's technology click here
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Jul 09, 2012 @ 08:02 AM
One of the people I've come to greatly respect is Atul Gawande. He's a doctor and
an author and we've featured him numerous times on the Ankota blog including as the author of Ankota's book of the year The Checklist Manifesto. Some of the key themse that we strongly embrace at Ankota are as follows:
- Coordinated care systems work better than isolated efforts
- It's not necessarily true that the most expensive care is the best care
- Checklists can vastly improve the quality of care
Today we bring him to you in video, courtesy of TED talks.
If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy some prior posts inspired by Atul Gawande, as follows:
If you enjoyed the TED talk video, here are some other TED talks that have been featured on the Ankota blog:
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Fri, May 25, 2012 @ 08:32 AM
Today's blog post comes with few words and instead let's a video do the talking. Produced by Ankota's partner Be Close, this video expresses the benefits of aging in place and living at home from the perspective of elderly moms.
Sometimes being in home care every day we can forget the value of what we do. We keep peoples loved ones in the surroundings where they're comfortable, where they made their memories, and away from the institutional feel, high costs and infections that come from aging in facilities.
Pretty nice, huh?
Be Close provides a way to help you monitor how your mom is doing. They
make sensors that go in mom or dad's house and keep track of things like when they use their favorite chair or open the refrigerator. The sensors are hardly noticable. Then they provide a monitoring service that let's you make sure mom's ok with her routine. You can learn more at www.beclose.com.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Fri, Apr 06, 2012 @ 10:31 AM
The Home Care Software Geek posts in this blog don't talk about Home Care Nursing Software, Private Duty Telephony, DME Delivery Software, Home Infusion Care Management or the other topics we focus on regularly at Ankota. Instead, these posts are intended to keep our readers up to date with technology trends that might be useful to your agencies, such as social media technologies, mobile devices, and what's happening from the big-boys like Microsoft, Google and Apple.
Many of my home care software geek posts are intended to inform home care about what's going on in the technology world that might affect you. Examples are when we
talk about smart phones, or tablet computers. Today's post, perfect for a Friday, is to show you something really futuristic, fun, and super-geeky: Google Glass...
Google glass is a technology that brings the internet to your eye glasses and let's you select things by looking at them, as well as give voice commands. This isn't a technology that I'd expect us to be using in home care any time soon, but hopefully it will inspire your imagination. You can get an idea of what it's like in this two and a half minute video.
What new technologies (not necessarily on the bleeding edge) are on the radar screen for your home care organization?
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Wed, Feb 01, 2012 @ 06:30 AM
Through their outreach to the home care community, Ankota has had a chance to learn a
lot from Stephen Tweed's company, Leading Home Care. We've shared content from Stephen and his team, including his son Jason Tweed, on numerous occasions. Here are some prior posts:
For 2012, Leading Home Care has announced the creation of a video series to help private home care agencies grow and thrive. As an apetizer, we've included the first video in the series, which among other things, cites three reasons why they expect 2012 to be a great year for Private Care, as follows:
To benefit from the full series, you should go to the website for leading home care and subscribe to one of their newsletters. For Private Care, the best is likely to be Private Duty Today.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota
Posted by Will Hicklen on Tue, May 10, 2011 @ 11:31 AM
I'm pretty sure that the one guy's trying to show us how to Dougie...
National Nurses Week is May 6-12, and Ankota would like to join The American Nurses Association and NAHC and the rest of the nation in thanking the country's nurses for all that they do. Not coincidentally, National Nurses Week coincides with Florence Nightingale's birthday. Nurses are the heartbeat of home healthcare and consistently assure that patients receive the best possible care. They are who patients trust.
Constant reports, Healthcare reform, payment reform, the emergence of Accountable Care Organizations and business concerns for productivity are among the many distractions they face every day. Nurses manage to focus on their patients consistently through all the disruption and will always be the leaders in providing care. Through the dedication of nurses, home health care will continue to improve and take on even greater importance in providing care for patients.
Ankota is proud to share this first video tribute from Nurseworld.us, and the second from Johnson & Johnson. And, to show that we know how to have a little fun and don't take ourselves too seriously, we're amused to share the first one you saw at the top of this post, too!
Posted by Will Hicklen on Wed, Mar 30, 2011 @ 02:19 PM
The Healthcare Delivery Management blog often deals with the business of coordinating and delivering home healthcare, medical equipment (HME and DME), Infusion nursing, Private Duty and related services, but today's videos are really just meant to provoke some thought about what drove you to be in the business you are in.
The CEO's of several companies from multiple industries were interviewed for the videos, including Ankota's CEO, Will Hicklen. The point of these videos is not to brag about Ankota (although that's always fun for us!), rather to hear directly from the CEOs of these organizations about the role of Inspiration, Creation, and Innovation in business.
Ankota is very proud to have been recently recognized as a leader in technology innovation by the Chesapeake Regional Technology Council. CRTC is the Mid Atlantic region's fastest growing technology organization, where Ankota is headquartered, and concerns itself with technology in all businesses including healthcare. The interviews were recorded and broadcast during the the CRTC's recent awards dinner. Many thanks to our friends at Meezonet for producing and sharing the videos!