[consulting] Consultants that have deployed healthcare-relatedDrupal projects

[Michael Haggerty]

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/1229244

Some interesting comments about healthcare IT issues.

Common thread: EVERYTHING has to be 99.99% available or the ENTIRE WORLD
will explode. Or something.

Thank you,
Michael Haggerty
Managing Partner
Trellon, LLC
http://www.trellon.com
(p) 301-577-6162
(c) 240-643-6561
(f) 413-691-9114
(aim) haggerty321



> -----Original Message-----
> From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
> On Behalf Of Chris Johnson
> Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 10:29 AM
> To: A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers
> Subject: Re: [consulting] Consultants that have deployed healthcare-
> relatedDrupal projects
> 
> On 4/18/07, Boris Mann <boris at bryght.com> wrote:
> 
> > It's actually *less* about "big healthcare" than it is about finding
> > some of the people that I remember specializing in e-health related
> > items. I remember some websites way back in late 2004.
> >
> > In fact, some of the people that have recently contacted me are
> > looking for community-style solutions (think more about training /
> > elearning related to healthcare). I'm trying to help make some
> > connections.
> >
> > There ARE some interesting thoughts regarding, well, a buzzword I just
> > made up :P, called "user centric healthcare" -- control over records
> > and treatments. But that gets into (in the US) HIPPA and really really
> > hairy data privacy and access, which as KarenS points out is highly
> > connected to access control.
> 
> I think you'll find restrictive laws regarding health care data in
> most "first world" countries -- most people aren't interested in
> letting just anyone know that they've got an incurable disease, etc.
> In the U.S., there are number of laws which apply, the most recent and
> comprehensive of which is the Health Insurance Portability and
> Accountability Act (HIPAA).  In Germany, data privacy laws concerning
> all kinds of personal data, including health care, have long been a
> part of the legal structure -- and they are in many ways more
> restrictive than those in the USA.
> 
> But they're not impossible to deal with.  As I said, I was running
> Drupal with claim data at my previous job.  We used SSL on 100% of the
> datastream, and there was nothing to see other than a login page
> without authentication.
> 
> 
> > And a final area is replacing those green screen / DOS apps used to
> > manage medical offices with Drupal-based practice management systems.
> > Scheduling, billing, connecting to upstream EDI-based insurance
> > systems, etc. etc.
> 
> Medical practice offices probably have the biggest problem and risk,
> as well as the hardest to meet requirements for data privacy in the
> USA, because of the mix of data involved.  Billing data isn't private,
> unless it includes patient data, which essentially all patient billing
> *will* include.  EDI is all about claim data, which is what we handled
> in my previous job.  (Go ahead, just ask me about X.12 and 837s and
> 271s.  No wait, on the other hand, don't!  :-)
> 
> Other than smaller "one-horse docs" most U.S. clinics use practice
> management systems which integrate some or all of the scheduling,
> billing, EDI, etc. activities in one system.  So it's security all
> over again.
> 
> Actually, the Drupal community's focus on preventing cross-site
> scripting attacks and SQL attacks, for example, really helps make
> Drupal as secure a starting framework as most frameworks.  (Thank you,
> security team!)  It's somewhat like the argument about secure
> programming using PHP or any "language X" -- it's really about having
> skilled, knowledgeable people doing the work, not the technology that
> makes the biggest difference.
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