Perspectives on Healthcare IT, clinical informatics, emerging technology, and life at the intersection of nursing and enterprise systems.
A privacy officer is the person a covered entity appoints to develop and implement its policies and procedures for complying with the HIPAA privacy requirements. This post explains the requirements in 45 CFR 164.530, including training, complaints, sanctions, mitigation, and documentation, how the role differs from the security official, and why informatics nurses are well placed for it.
NANDA Taxonomy II is a classification of nursing diagnostic concepts that names and codes the ways patients respond to health problems or life events. This post explains how the taxonomy supports care planning, how it links to the Nursing Interventions Classification and Nursing Outcomes Classification, and what recent studies show about education, label structure, and AI-generated nursing diagnoses.
The Interoperability Standards Advisory, or ISA, is the process and online resource through which the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology identifies and publicizes interoperability standards and implementation specifications for specific needs. This post explains how the ISA is organized, what adoption levels mean, how Reference Editions work, and what a listing does not require.
Emergency access is the granting of user rights to reach protected health information and applications under emergency conditions outside normal workflows. This post explains the HIPAA requirement for an emergency access procedure, how break-the-glass overrides work, what a systematic review and dynamic access research say, and how nurses and analysts balance fast care with patient privacy.
Cost-benefit analysis, or CBA, is a process for estimating the costs and benefits of a project or investment to judge whether it is worthwhile. This post explains the steps, including discounting and sensitivity analysis, what a longitudinal study of Dutch hospitals found about digital maturity and financial performance, and how nurses and informaticists contribute to credible business cases.
Attribute-based access control, or ABAC, is a logical access control model that decides whether to allow an action by evaluating rules against attributes of the user, the object, the action, and the environment. This post explains how it differs from role-based access control, what a hospital study reported about role explosion and efficiency, and what nurses and analysts should know.
Vishing, or voice phishing, is a fraud tactic in which attackers use phone calls, voicemail, or VoIP to trick people into revealing sensitive information or taking harmful actions. This post explains how it works in health care, what a 3,000-call multilingual research dataset adds to detection work, what the HIPAA Security Rule requires for training, and the verification habits that stop it.
A trading partner agreement is an agreement between parties that exchange information in electronic transactions, whether stand-alone or part of a larger contract. This post explains how HIPAA defines it, what 45 CFR 162.915 prohibits such agreements from changing, how it differs from a business associate agreement, and why informatics and revenue cycle teams need to understand it.
Quality measures are tools that express the quality of care as a number by comparing performance with a criterion. This post explains how process, outcome, and patient-reported measures differ, what an electronic diagnostic measure for pneumonia and a review of patient-reported outcome measures in payment models found, and why documentation and data quality decide whether a measure is fair.
A Medicaid Management Information System is the integrated set of procedures and computer subsystems a state uses to run its Medicaid program. This post explains what an MMIS does, how 42 CFR Part 433 sets federal funding conditions at 90 percent for development and 75 percent for operation, how T-MSIS Analytic Files support research, and why clinicians and informaticists should understand the system behind claims and enrollment.
GIGO, garbage in, garbage out, is the principle that the quality of any output depends on the quality of the input. This post explains how it applies to EHR documentation, reporting, research, and AI, what a 2026 systematic review found about factors shaping inpatient record data quality, and what nurses and informaticists can do to protect accurate data.
DS4P, or Data Segmentation for Privacy, is a standard that lets a provider tag a clinical document with privacy metadata describing the data’s classification and any redisclosure limits set by law. This post explains how security labels work, why 42 CFR Part 2 and other rules create demand for segmentation, what an automated FHIR segmentation study found, and how nurses and informaticists handle sensitive information.
Computer vision is artificial intelligence that enables computers to identify objects and content in images and video. This post explains how it is used in medical imaging, screening, and hospital monitoring, what a pneumothorax meta-analysis and a screening review found, and why privacy, bias, generalizability, and workflow integration need governance.
Acceptance testing is a user-run test event that demonstrates whether an application meets business objectives and system requirements. This post explains how it differs from unit, integration, and system testing, what a national study of CPOE safety tests and a study of SAFER Guide adherence found, and how nurses can make acceptance testing realistic before go-live.
Virtual reality is a computer-generated three-dimensional environment that a person can interact with as if it were physical, usually through a headset. This post explains how VR is used in health care, what recent meta-analyses show for pain, anxiety, and ICU patients, what the limits of the evidence are, and what nurses and informatics teams need to plan for.
Structural interoperability is the shared structure and format of data exchange, the message standards that let a receiving system read data at the field level. This post explains how it differs from foundational and semantic levels, how HL7 v2 and FHIR define structure and validation, what recent studies show about pairing structure with meaning, and where nurses and informaticists see structure problems.
Pharmacy informatics is the field that applies medication-related data, knowledge, and technology to improve medication management and safety. This post explains its scope, what systematic reviews found about barcode scanning, dispensing cabinets, and alert frequency, how pharmacists redesign autoverification and drug interaction alerts, and how nurses and pharmacy informaticists work together.
MeSH, the Medical Subject Headings thesaurus, is the National Library of Medicine’s controlled, hierarchical vocabulary for indexing, cataloging, and searching biomedical information. This post explains its descriptors and tree structure, how automated indexing with the Medical Text Indexer works and where humans still step in, and how nurses and informaticists can use MeSH for better evidence searches.
Foundational interoperability is the first level of interoperability: the building blocks that let one system connect to another to send and receive data. This post explains how it differs from structural and semantic levels, what a scoping review of EHR interoperability found, what ONC reports on national exchange, and why connection alone does not mean usable data.
Electronic prior authorization, or ePA, uses the NCPDP SCRIPT standard to let a prescriber submit medication-specific prior authorization criteria and receive an approval in real time. This post explains how ePA works, how it differs from the CMS prior authorization API rule that excludes drugs, what a survey of 8,419 family physicians found about administrative burden, and how nurses and staff are affected.