* QA with John Halamka, CIO of Caregroup Health Systems of Boston
At the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society show in New Orleans last week, I caught up with John Halamka, CIO of Caregroup Health Systems of Boston. Halamka was speaking at HIMSS about the progress of standards for the interoperability of health information systems. I spoke to Halamka about compliance to regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Here are excerpts from our discussion:
Deni Connor: Automation plays a big part in being compliant.
John Halamka: Obviously all we’ve done in storage – Information Lifecycle Management, Hierarchical Storage Management – has to be automated. All the business rules are automated and we decide what our archiving policy is, what our data destruction policy is, and it’s tough, I’ll tell you. I have limited budgets. Costs of storage, while it is coming down the demand for storage is going up by 25% a year. I have to actually say, do I want to archive that MP3 file for seven years if that is the requisite archival time from a business perspective. It’s very challenging.
Deni Connor: Though in compliance activities, budget is a little easier to get, especially if it is related to litigation issues … the legal counsel is going to get the budget for archiving or e-discovery software.
John Halamka: I’ll tell you in the non-profit world where I work, compliance is a matter of risk. We have 250 organizations or so we need to be compliant to. Some of these say if you have this paint color on the wall, it violates OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Act] compliance or whatever. So you say what is the fee if you are discovered to be non-compliant. $10. Can you afford to pay the $1,000 to repaint the wall, or are you just going to pay the $10. We have to very carefully ask what is the right thing to do, what is the cost to be non-compliant.
Storage in the news:
* Microsoft got into healthcare and the interoperability of health information systems.
* Sun signed an agreement for Hitachi Data System to support its Sun StorageTek 6920 storage array.
* Healthcare IT leaders debate interoperability standards for health information systems.
* John Halamka, CIO of Caregroup Health Systems of Boston talks about standards for health information system interoperability.
* HP acquires Polyserve.
