Practice Fusion

• MELVILLE, N.Y., March 19, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- TrustCommerce, a Sphere company and leading provider of end-to-end integrated healthcare payments and security software, today announced that its Cloud Payments platform is now integrated with the Practice Fusion electronic health records (EHR), a Veradigm Network solution.
• TrustCommerce is also integrated with the Veradigm® FollowMyHealth's Personal Health Record and Mobile Patient Experience solutions and Veradigm® Practice Management.
• "We're excited about this new integration with Veradigm to bring integrated payments to the thousands of providers using Practice Fusion," said Ryne Natzke, Chief Revenue Officer at TrustCommerce.
• By enabling payments directly within Veradigm applications, the patient financial experience process is improved by reducing the friction needed to collect payments.

• Veradigm Inc. (NASDAQ: MDRX), a leading provider of healthcare data and technology solutions, announced today that it will now offer a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) agent for Practice Fusion Billing Services, a Veradigm Network solution.
• Through its integration with Microsoft and the Azure-based software solution from Zammo.ai Microsoft accelerator software vendor, Practice Fusion Billing Services customers can now benefit from instant conversation responses and feedback directly from the Practice Fusion EHR platform.
• Practice Fusion Billing Services integrates Microsoft Azure AI Search and Azure OpenAI Service.
• The AI has been trained in a closed system, based upon a comprehensive billing knowledge base, and will generate normalized real time responses to Practice Fusion Billing Services questions.

Protecting the privacy of health information: A baker’s dozen takeaways from FTC cases

• In the past few months, the FTC has announced case after case involving consumers’ sensitive health data, alleging violations of both Section 5 of the FTC Act and the FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule.
• The privacy of health information is top of mind for consumers – and so it’s top of mind for the FTC.

Health Privacy: The Basics

• Rather, it’s anything that conveys information – or enables an inference – about a consumer’s health.
• Indeed, Premom, BetterHelp, GoodRx, and Flo Health make clear that the fact that a consumer is using a particular health-related app or website – one related to mental health or fertility, for example – or how they interact with that app (say, turning “pregnancy mode” on or off) may itself be health information.
• Our guidance on health and location highlights the fact that location data can convey health information.
• For example, repeated trips to a cancer treatment facility may convey highly sensitive information about an individual’s health.
• To stay on the right side of the FTC Act, take a broad view of what constitutes health data and protect it accordingly.
• Your obligation to protect the privacy of health information is a given.  The need for privacy-by-design is (or should be!)

HIPAA-related claims

• “HIPAA Compliant,” “HIPAA Secure,” and similar claims may deceive consumers.  Compliance with HIPAA, the national law protecting the privacy of certain health information, has become a shorthand among patients and providers alike for health privacy protection.
• Not surprisingly, companies offering health-related products and services often want to tout HIPAA compliance to give consumers comfort – even if these companies aren’t actually covered by HIPAA or aren’t actually complying with HIPAA.
• FTC enforcement actions like GoodRx, BetterHelp, Henry Schein, and SkyMed make clear that HIPAA claims like that may deceive consumers, whether those consumers are health care providers (like the dentists in Henry Schein) or regular people (like the therapy patients in BetterHelp).
• In ECM, the FTC proved in court that a company that gave its business customers labels and certificates bearing false claims about biodegradability had provided “the means and instrumentalities” to deceive downstream consumers.

Other Health Privacy Practices

•  It may be tempting to use your privacy policy to reserve the right to change your health data practices, so that any continued use of your service constitutes “consent” to the changes.
• The FTC’s action in Vitagene makes clear that’s not a lawful means for obtaining consent for material retroactive privacy policy changes.
• Hidden euphemisms don’t cut it.  Rather than living up to their legal obligation to tell consumers the whole truth, some companies hide key terms about data practices in dense privacy policies or terms of service filled with ambiguous language that cloaks how they really use consumers’ health information.
• The orders in our recent health privacy cases uniformly require affirmative express consent – consent that can be obtained only following a clear and conspicuous disclosure of all material facts.

Health privacy: A top priority for the FTC – and for your company

• Practice Fusion, a Veradigm Network solution, is a cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) system designed specifically for independent practices, aiming to cater to the needs of medical professionals, service providers, and patients.
• Practice Fusion’s comprehensive system ensures secure and reliable access to all patient and practice information.
• The EHR is designed to streamline administrative tasks and provide clinicians with the tools they need to provide the best possible patient care.
• Practice Fusion's wide range of features, including clinical charting, lab and imaging integrations, and e-prescribing, helps practice staff save time and increase efficiency.