The Readmore 2014

Not the type of health care blogging that I like to see. Get well Rick!

Rick Lee, my favorite photo blogger is in the hospital. If you follow his photography leave him some virtual Flickr flowers in the post comments like some of his other regular readers. Here you go Rick - doing my best Rick Lee.

DHHS and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have added new enforcement statistics and data to the OCR HIPAA Privacy and Compliance and Enforcement site. Previously, I've posted about the statistics.

OCR added new information broken down by the following topics:

• Charts showing state-specific case investigation results (West Virginia shows (see the graphic above): 71% resolved after intake and review; 18% corrective action taken; 11% no violation)
• Calendar-year enforcement results graphs and charts
• Calendar-year graphs showing the number of complaints received
• Yearly variation in the top 5 types of issues resolved through corrective action

The statistics show that the number of complaints made to OCR continue to increase -- from 6,534 complaints in 2004 to 8,132 complaints in 2007.

Also, the statistics show that the top 5 types of complaints requiring corrective action have remained fairly consistent - except in 2007 "notice" jumps into the top 5.

I would be interested to hear others thoughts on the compliance statistics.

While reading this week's Grand Rounds hosted this week at Suture for a Living, I jumped over to an interesting post by Dr. Val on an effort by her and Revolution Health to team up with medical experts and mommy bloggers to create a new health index for Mother's Day.

West Virginia ranks 38 out of 51 states on the momScore. As we head into this weekend's Mother's Day, Anna Marie Jarvis would want us to try to raise our ranking. I'm issuing a challenge to all West Virginia health care providers to think about and work on improving these statistics and metrics.

West Virginia received a a score of 69 out of a possible 100. The areas used for the ranking include: access to prenatal care, air quality, availability of childcare services, family paid leave policy, health care coverage rate, infant mortality, maternal mortality, risk of pregnancy complications, affordability of children's health insurance and violent crime rate.

If you want to discuss or debate West Virginia's rankings you can post your comments on the interactive momScore community.

The West Virginia Health Care Authority approved for public comment proposed revisions to the Certificate of Need Cardiac Catheterization Standards (current 3/19/2007 standards).

These revisions were made by the Authority after Governor Manchin rejected the previously proposed standards. The proposed standards continue to modify the requirements for the participants in the demo pilot project involving offering therapeutic cardiac catheterization.

The standards distinguish between Primary (Emergency) Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (Primary PCI) which involves providing cardiac catheterization services within 120 minutes of an emergency myocardial infarction and Elective Therapeutic Catheterizations. The proposed standards also set new need threshold levels for elective therapeutic catheterization.

Written comments on the proposed standards may be submitted to Dayle D. Stepp, Director of Certificate of Need, no later than May 23, 2008.

I previously reported on the modifications to the standards here, here and here.

A welcome to West Virginia's newest law blogger, Dave Yaussey, who is blogging at the WV Environmental Law. Dave is a partner at Robinson & McElwee in their Charleston office.

I use to practice law with Dave and consider him to be one of the go to environmental lawyers in West Virginia. During a conversation a few months ago talked to him about blogging and suggested that he start one on environmental law. He took up the challenge and is off and running. Congrats Dave!

The California HealthCare Foundation has issued a new report, The Wisdom of Patients" Health Care Meets Online Social Media, authored by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, a health economist, management consultant and fellow health care blogger at Health Populi.

The report covers a lot of territory and provides a great overview of the quickly evolving and developing health care social media and health 2.0 movement. The report highlights how health care consumers are becoming empowered by social media and the overall impact the live web is having on patients, providers, insurers, etc.

Online health care is moving from one based on "health information retrieval" to patients and providers generating and sharing content online. This growing online collaboration is leading to unique approaches to care and a larger value proposition of harnessing the collective wisdom for other purposes including -- coordination of care, clinical insight, higher quality, prevention, etc. In the end, this may even lead to more cost efficient care.

A special thanks to Jane for interviewing me and acknowledging me in the report for my insight on some of the health care legal implications .

To borrow a quote from Secretary Leavitt courtesy of Fred Fortin who I have been following as he micro-blog via Twitter at the World Health Care Conference, "pong and Wii. We are just leaving the pong era in health care . . . "

For more on the new report check out CHCF's Press Release and a summary of the report (download full report).

Val Jones, M.D. at Dr. Val and The Voice of Reason does a great job hosting this week's edition of Grand Rounds, titled: "How Do You Feel About That?"

Great job and thanks for adding one of my posts. Don't miss the photo links to the various emotion categories (click on the category headings). Reminds me of my Flickr linked Grand Rounds 3.5: A Visual Tour.