“What’d I miss?” -Week of May 4th

As usual there were a lot of things happening this week in healthcare, and not all of it was technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I browsed this week:

The American Society of Consultant Pharmacists (ASCP) held their Midyear in Orlando, FL where Todd Eury (Pharmacytechnology.com) fed us timely updates via Twitter.

The FBI investigated a ransom demand from a hijacker claiming to have stolen approximately 8.3 million patient records from a Virginia government web site.  The hijacker’s demand note read: “ATTENTION VIRGINIA I have your [stuff]! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(“

We got to see a nifty little video on “The Impact of Health IT on Consumers, Payers, and Providers” by Adam C. Powell.

A group of senators asked for the release of federal regulations that allow electronic-prescribing for controlled substances. Whether this is a good idea or not remains to be seen. Security, security, security.

Dr. John Halamka (Life as a Healthcare CIO) gave us an interesting look at what he calls “Your Karma Account Balance“. Be yourself, stay calm, stick to your values and do the right thing. Then at the end of the day you’ll be able to look yourself in the mirror without any feelings of regret. We could all benefit from this information.

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) released their numbers for the HIMSS 09 Coference and Exhibition. Staggering. The conference drew nearly 27,500 attendees. For those of you that missed it, you can find the sessions posted here.

The Healthcare IT Guy blogged about Amazon’s offer of free cloud computing services to educators and students. Cloud computing is an exciting field that I am just beginning to explore. Expect to see much more about this in the future.