Marion K. Jenkins, PhD, FHIMSS

Your weekly dose of wisdom from the Physicians Practice experts.

Six major reasons that do not apply only to healthcare.

The debate over pros and cons of health IT persist, but to find success in your medical practice you need one key element: buy-in from the key players.

Here's some observations from my walkabout with 38,000 of my closest friends in healthcare IT, better known as the HIMSS14 Conference recently held in Orlando.

There are many myths about cloud IT services. Here, we dispel the major ones and provide a checklist for those considering a trip to the cloud.

Recent technology advances make cloud hosting an attractive option for healthcare. But HIPAA compliance is not automatic.

Worried about potential HIPAA security breaches? You don’t need to worry about your EHR …and that’s the problem.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This video is worth about a million words.

ICD-10 provides many needed attributes, but some of the data being collected seems way too excessive for practices.

While EHR adoption continues to increase, there are significant hurdles left to overcome, and the healthcare industry has a long way to go to catch up.

The latest statistics in the Physicians Practice Technology Survey indicate some surprising insights on EHR adoption among medical practices.

It’s not healthcare, it’s sick-care, and it’s not a system, so it can’t be broken.

Even following the HIPAA Security Rule, which requires protecting computer systems with anti-virus and anti-spam, computers can still get infected. Why is that?

Chances are good that you have some major ticking software time bombs lurking in your medical practice's computer environment, namely Windows XP and Server 2003.

So you think using a certified EHR makes your organization HIPAA secure? Think again. Careless users and mobile devices represent your greatest risk.

In the underlying causes of failures and dissatisfaction with EHRs, there are actually several issues that require commitment from vendors and providers to solve.

Increased EHR adoption and optimization, coupled with collaboration among vendors, can take healthcare data to the next level. Online consumerism can pave the way.

The main themes of this year's conference were the ongoing quest toward interoperability among EHRs and other systems, plus HIPAA security and mobility.

Using an EHR to simply replace the paper patient chart is not worth it.

The dangers of auto complete and cut and paste in EHRs lie not with EHRs themselves, but with potential misuse.

Are you craving national attention? Just put patient data on a laptop, as that seems to be the early trend in 2013 to becoming a HIPAA headline.

When it comes to digital health records, electronic silos are no better than paper silos.

It is 2013, but non-compliance with HIPAA remains an issue in the healthcare industry. Here are four tips to get your practice on track and in line.

While the current focus on health IT tends to be on features or capabilities, it's time to take a look at the higher purposes of these devices and software.

The debate rages on between the technical creators and the users of EHRs as to who should change their behaviors for smooth implementation.

Medical practices are naturally evolving and at least thinking about becoming more sophisticated about their EHR systems.

A huge barrier to health IT adoption is the divide between those on the technical side and those using the technology.

There are a couple of economic bright spots on the horizon for physician practices, but only if they stop sitting in the sidelines.

A smartphone can be a provider's dream in explaining procedures to patients and family, but also a possible legal and ethical nightmare.

In every community there is a small group of well-known people whose private lives - and especially their medical records - would be of potential interest or even possible financial value to certain people.