It sounds like a mouthful but one of the most important areas that any healthcare IT organization will have to deal with in the new world of HITECH and Meaningful Use is Identity and Access Management.  Let’s think about this for a minute.  Healthcare IT organizations have always been responsible for managing the user accounts within the organization, facilitating access to various systems ranging from the electronic medical record (EMR) to email to file servers (i....

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Recently a woman in Winton Hills, Ohio sued the University of Cincinatti Medical Center because her bitter ex-boyfriend, who worked at the hospital, and two other employees posted her medical records on Facebook. If proven, this activity represents a tragic breach of HIPAA and illustrates how an insider can put a healthcare organization at risk. A recent Information Security study suggested that American healthcare organizations spend six percent of their budget or more on implementing security tools, policies ...

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My job as a Project Manager is to make order out of chaos.  I don’t mean to imply that all projects are chaotic. However, it is easy to lose track of details if you don’t have a good organizational system to capture them.  Many books and articles have been written on the subject.  And as anyone who has stood in a grocery line surveying magazine covers can attest, this topic gets lots of press ...

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I love a good teaser. When someone puts out a statement that seems authored by Captain Obvious himself, it makes me take notice. Is this person about to make me realize something that I've taken for granted that is going to rock my world, or make me realize they were the goalie for the dart team in college?  Is this person "smart"?"Smart" is something everyone has been striving for, but I'm here ...

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HIMSS 2014 was my first trade show as a Park Place employee, and my first experience with the healthcare IT industry. I was standing in the booth the first day of the event when a man came by and looked around.“Can I help you?” I asked.“Not really,” he said, “We used to use Park Place International but my company switched to another vendor. But sometimes I still get advice from your people....

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After attending the HIMSS conference in Orlando last week, I would say 2014 is the year of analytics.  Booths all across the HIMSS exposition floor advertised solutions focused on outcomes and quality.  For the longest time, we have heard the Ford commercials with the slogan “Quality is Job 1”.  In the drive to report on clinical quality measures to meet Meaningful Use objectives, healthcare is now faced with the challenge of how to harvest the ...

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It’s getting hard to keep up.  How do you keep your equipment up to speed, your techs sharp, your budget low? How do you balance it all, keeping users happy, protecting your data, keeping your network secure…..while (hopefully) sleeping at night?I’ve seen the frustration firsthand.  Hospital IT departments have to keep up with rapidly changing technologies and architectures, while delivering reliable and responsive services to their users.  When doing a hardware refresh, ...

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I was a little nervous to write my first-ever blog.  I don’t spend a lot of time on social media and what insight would I have to offer to my high tech peers and colleagues?  But then I thought, Project Management doesn’t have any specific boundaries and is an important skill set across all industries and job roles.   In this article, I’ve outlined some tips and tricks to help you successfully manage ...

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So you think having an approved scanning vendor (ADV) scan a couple of your external IP’s 4 times a year for a bundled cost of $189.00/year, and attesting to a questionnaire means you are PCI-DSS compliant?  Think again.The goal is to complete due diligence to ensure a secure network and organization at all levels against all kinds of threats. Complete your assessment as discussed in Part 2 of this blog article (http://parkplaceintl.com/blog/pci-dss-short-acronym-long-journey-part-2/).  You ...

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As you prepare your Christmas checklist for those that you love, let’s not forget to include a stocking stuffer our old friend, Disaster Preparedness. After all, he never sleeps! Over the last decade, we’ve experienced a staggering increase in natural disasters as demonstrated in a recent FEMA chart (2013 not included).In our last Disaster Recovery segment, we discussed the building blocks of a Disaster Recovery program and did a high level overview of the first ...

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