From the case study:

Challenge
Odyssey HealthCare needed a way to electronically capture patient visit information to meet Federal reporting regulations and also cut down on the amount of paperwork the company was processing every day.
Solution
Media Sourcery used their AppMobilizer solution on the BlackBerry smartphone to capture clinical information at the point of care. Home caregivers used BlackBerry smartphones with an electronic Home Health Aide Visit Form and Symptom Assessment Survey to enter patient care information; that data is then transferred to a back end database for reporting and billing purposes. After an automatic check for data accuracy, the visit records are automatically entered into Odyssey’s McKesson Horizon system for billing.
Odyssey’s Results
• Gather patient information at point of care
• Less Paper, reduced administration, faster billing
• Improved working conditions for staff
• Company is better positioned to meet new requirements

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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sets aside $20 billion for direct funding and incentives for providers who implement electronic health records and use them in a “meaningful” way beginning in 2010. However, the bill leaves it to the Health and Human Services Secretary to determine what kinds of actions constitute “meaningful use,” and some analysts say that ambiguity built into the law could actually delay the lengthy acquisition and implementation process.

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Odyssey is one of the largest hospice providers in the country, offering personalized care and support to thousands of patients and their families across the country each day.

The session information:

The worm, known as “Conficker,” has not harmed any patients, they say, but it poses a potential threat to hospital operations.

“A few weeks ago, we discovered medical devices, MRI machines, infected with Conficker,” said Marcus Sachs, director of the Internet Storm Center, an early-warning system for Internet threats .

Around March 24, researchers monitoring the worm noticed that an imaging machine was reaching out over the Internet to get instructions — presumably from the programmers who created Conficker.

The researchers discovered that more than 300 similar devices at hospitals around the world had been compromised. The manufacturer of the devices told them none of the machines were supposed to be connected to the Internet — and yet they were.

Normally, the solution would be simply to install a patch, which Microsoft released in October. But the device manufacturer said rules from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required that a 90-day notice before the machines could be patched.

“For 90 days these infected machines could easily be used in an attack, including, for example, the leaking of patient information,” said Rodney Joffe, a senior vice president at NeuStar, a communications company that belongs to an industry working group created to deal with the worm.