As adoption rates rise, health IT makes protected health information (PHI) available to more organizations and entities, increasing the likelihood of data being improperly disclosed, lost or stolen. Despite the risks and costs of a potential data breach, many healthcare executives aren’t doing enough to support their organizations’ security efforts, but researchers from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) believe they’d do more if the far-reaching consequences of a breach were more clearly outlined.

LAS VEGAS—Image-enabled personal health records (PHRs), the cornerstone of an IHE-based image sharing network, have leveraged the cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS) profile to engage consumers, David S. Mendelson, MD, chief of clinical informatics at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, said during a Feb. 22 session at the 2012 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference. The PHR model mimics (and could augment) the CD-based image exchange model.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Just as PACS liberated studies from their confinement to hard film, so CDs and cloud computing are enabling image sharing across institutions, communities and beyond. But as the cloud buzz grows louder, a group of presenters at the 2011 meeting of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) argued on Thursday that the technology may be green—and ultimately inferior to Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative.