Hacking Healthcare Quotes

“The removal of a healthy gall bladder is often just a part of a diagnostic process.”
― Fred Trotter, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

“If there is no mechanism for accessing the history of name changes for an individual, then you should regard the EHR as dangerously immature.”
― Fred Trotter, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

“HIPAA is probably the most ironic acronym in healthcare. It stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Although HIPAA has succeeded largely in making health information more “accountable,” it is usually the first excuse for not making it portable.”
― Fred Trotter, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

“If you truly separate the identity of the patient from a set of health data, that health data is no longer PHI.”
― Fred Trotter, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

“Small providers regularly ignore the AMAs licensing requirements (much like running pirated copies of software) and hope to slide under the radar of the AMA’s enforcement. This can backfire drastically, and be an expensive mistake for a small practice.”
― Fred Trotter, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

“If healthcare providers want to use CPT codes in health IT software, and they must in order to legally bill third parties for healthcare services, they must license them from the AMA to avoid a legal fight.”
― Fred Trotter, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

“Institutions that adopt systems and use them in certified ways in 2011 and 2012 could getting about $50,000 per doctor in total payments by being meaningful users of certified EHR technology over the period from 2011 to 2016.”
― Fred Trotter, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

“For decades, doctors had no idea what they wanted, and software developers have given it to them.”
― Fred Trotter, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use

“About the same number of people die each year from medical errors as from automobile accidents. Heart disease and cancer kill the most people in the United States, more than 500,000 each year. But stroke and lung diseases are each responsible for about 100,000 deaths each year — and scandalously, so are medical errors. Medical errors are notoriously difficult to track, given our litigious society, so we really do not know how many deaths that statisticians attribute to cancer or heart disease were also related to medical errors. But given the high likelihood that errors are implicated in some of these deaths, it is possible that medical errors could be the third leading cause of death in the United States.”
― Fred Trotter, Hacking Healthcare: A Guide to Standards, Workflows, and Meaningful Use