Here are a few I came across last week.
Note: Each link is followed by a title and few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
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ONC launches Phase 2 of Sync for Genes
Published March 15 2018, 7:35am EDT
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has launched Phase 2 of the Sync for Genes initiative, aimed at demonstrating how standardized genomic data can be shared between laboratories, providers, patients, as well as researchers.
Four pilot sites—Lehigh Valley Health Network, National Marrow Donor Program, Utah Newborn Screening Program, and Weill Cornell Medicine—are participating in Phase 2 and will continue to leverage HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to accelerate standardization of sharing patients’ genomic data among health IT systems so it can be integrated easily with other clinical information.
In Phase 2, the four pilot sites will expand Phase 1 work on FHIR genomics profiles—the portion of the standard related to clinical genomics—with specific use cases. In addition, the pilot sites will focus on the integration of genomics information into a clinical setting for supporting care and research efforts.
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EHR data mining identifies undiagnosed genetic diseases
Published March 16 2018, 7:11am EDT
A new electronic health record data mining technique developed by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center has found that undiagnosed genetic diseases may be more prevalent in the general population than previously assumed.
Researchers mapped the clinical features of more than 1,200 Mendelian diseases into phenotypes captured from the EHR and summarized this evidence as phenotype risk scores to find patterns of symptoms that may be caused by an underlying genetic variant.
By applying these phenotype risk scores to nearly 22,000 genotyped individuals, they uncovered 18 associations between rare variants and phenotypes consistent with Mendelian diseases. And, in 16 patients, the rare genetic variants were associated with severe outcomes such as organ transplants.
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Babylon and others removed from NHS Apps Library
Hannah Crouch
12 March 2018
Babylon and two other medical apps have been removed from the NHS Apps Library, with NHS England citing beta testing as the reason behind it.
The library is currently in a test version ,with NHS England hoping to have it nationally available by the end of 2018.
However some apps featured in the library, which aims to steer patients towards trusted digital tools, have been dropped following the beta testing phase.
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From app store to drug store, digital health is redefining pharma’s pipeline
By Casey Ross
March 13, 2018
The pitches always sounded promising: A new software app could track glucose levels for people with diabetes or soothe the brains of insomniacs. Most pharma executives would politely smile and nod, but then park their money somewhere else.
Not anymore.
Backed by a growing body of evidence, software is itself becoming a prescription for diseases ranging from depression to heart disease, and drug companies are starting to take notice. In the past couple years, many have quickly ramped up their investments in digital startups, infusing software-based therapies into pipelines once dominated by traditional medicines.
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What One Hospital Learned From a Ransomware Attack
Philip Betbeze, March 15, 2018
A vendor portal left an Indiana health system vulnerable to a cyberattack. Its CEO decided to pay the cyberattack ransom. Here's why, and what he wants other leaders to know.
It's breach season.
That's what Ron Pelletier, founding partner of Pondurance, a cybersecurity company based in Indianapolis, calls February through April. Partly, that's because it's also tax season, when a lot of financial information is being sent and received via the internet. Bad actors often spend the latter part of the previous year "weaponizing" their tools and doing reconnaissance. Then they look for vulnerabilities.
For Hancock Health in Greenfield, Indiana, just outside Indianapolis, breach season started a little early. About 9:30 p.m. on the night of January 11, Steve Long, its president and CEO, got a call from the health system's IT staff, telling him a computer in the lab was infected with ransomware. In an abundance of caution, the IT staff had turned everything off that was connected to the internet.
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VA goes all in on APIs
- By Adam Mazmanian
- Mar 09, 2018
The Department of Veterans Affairs is going all in on application programming interfaces – APIs – as a way of delivering data to health care partners and outside developers.
The API effort is being organized via a new project, dubbed Lighthouse. Lighthouse is an API management platform that makes data feeds available to developers looking to incorporate VA data into online tools and applications.
The big picture, as announced by VA Secretary David Shulkin at the Health Information and Management Systems conference in Las Vegas, is that the veterans' agency is supporting industry health data standards including the API standard FHIR.
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AI software predicts outcomes for patients with brain tumors
Published March 15 2018, 7:27am EDT
Researchers at Emory and Northwestern universities have developed artificial intelligence software that can predict the survival of patients diagnosed with glioma, a deadly form of brain tumor, by analyzing digital images of tissue biopsies.
Being able to predict the course of a patient’s glioma at diagnosis is vital given that it carries a bleak prognosis. Gliomas are classified as either low-grade or high-grade based on their appearance under a microscope. The problem is that microscopic examination is extremely subjective, with different pathologists often providing different interpretations.
However, researchers used deep learning to train software to learn visual patterns associated with patient survival using images of brain tumor tissue samples. What they discovered was that when the software was trained using digital images and genomic data their predictions of how long patients survive beyond diagnosis were more accurate than those of human pathologists.
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Special Report: The policies, processes and technologies to guard the IoT for healthcare
Experts are anticipating the wrath of cybercriminals targeting the hundreds of thousands of IoT devices already deployed in 2018 and beyond.
By Bill Siwicki
March 15, 201807:07 AM
While medical equipment has long presented thorny security problems, Internet of Things devices in hospitals bring entirely new, and often daunting, cyberthreats.
Take Mirai malware as just the latest example. In late 2017, cybersecurity experts discovered a new variant of Mirai, which transforms Linux networked devices into remote-controlled bots that can be used as part of a botnet in major network attacks. This new variant was designed specially to attack Internet of Things devices.
“The attack is a distributed denial of service attack, meaning the malware now can commandeer previously immune devices and use them to target large amounts of traffic at other devices, causing them to fail due to resource exhaustion,” explained Mike Ahmadi, global director of IoT security at DigiCert, a cybersecurity company that specializes in digital certificates, SSL, encryption and the IoT. “What is particularly onerous is that there are an exponentially larger number of devices – potentially billions – now susceptible to the malware, dramatically increasing the number of potential attacks.”
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Hospital Doc Review Sites Yield Higher Patient Satisfaction Scores
Hospital-run online review websites yield more patient comments that tend to portray more patient satisfaction than comments left on third-party review websites.
By Sara Heath
March 13, 2018 - Clinicians often fare better on hospital-issued patient satisfaction surveys and online provider review websites, according to a recent study presented at the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
The study, published in August 2017 in Orthopedics, compared the nature of online provider reviews and patient satisfaction levels posted on hospital-hosted websites compared to commercial review websites such as Vitals or HealthGrades.
Online provider reviews are an emerging issue for healthcare professionals. With the rise of social media and other review websites – think of Yelp or even the comments section of Amazon – healthcare consumers have also wanted their voices to be heard.
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63% of Americans don't know where their medical data is stored: 8 survey insights
March 14, 2018
Many American healthcare consumers have no idea where their medical data is kept, which is concerning in an era where data breaches occur at alarming rates, according to a recent ScalaMed survey.
ScalaMed, an Australian-based health tech startup that offers a mobile prescription system, asked 800 U.S. patients about the problems they face accessing their health information.
Here are eight survey insights.
1. Nearly 62.8 percent of respondents don't know where their medical data is kept or who has access to it.
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HIT Think How artificial intelligence is already paying dividends in healthcare
Published March 15 2018, 5:48pm EDT
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. And we may not even know it. As a cohort of technologies that lets machines solve problems and execute tasks formerly reserved for humans, AI drives everything from smartphone location data to flagging email span.
The power of AI starts with large data sets, something that’s become more evident in healthcare. Automated patient records, information sharing across entities and the full digitization of business operations has ushered in the era of big data. Providers now are only beginning to determine how to use this new technology to create efficiencies, while also maintaining and improving the patient experience.
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Armenian PM instructs to introduce e-health system in 15 days
March 15, 2018 14:08
YEREVAN. – Armenian Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan instructed to ensure full implementation of the e-health system within 15 days.
In particular, Minister of Healthcare Levon Altunyan, Territorial Administration Minister Davit Lokyan, Transport, Communications and Information Technologies Minister Vahan Martirosyan, heads of regional administration were instructed to ensure implementation of the system. Yerevan Mayor Taron Margaryan was offered to create conditions for integration of all capital and regional medical institutions in the e-health system.
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Here’s what needs to happen for digital health care information-sharing to actually become a successful reality
Aneesh Chopra outlines what’s still missing.
A vision delivered needs relentless focus on execution
Jared Kushner and Seema Verma’s vision of a patient-centered health care information-sharing ecosystem through the MyHealthEData initiative drew near-universal praise, including my immediate take following last Tuesday’s announcement.
In the days that followed the launch, a multi-stakeholder coalition, of which I am a part, pledged to enable consumers to access all of their health and coverage information to share and use as they see fit. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) courted more developers to aid 53 million Medicare beneficiaries in navigating the delivery system. And the Department of Veterans Affairs recruited an initial cohort of 11 leading health systems to join in an “Open API Pledge” to push the industry faster toward a common language that can work for doctors and hospitals regardless of which particular IT system runs on the back end — including a new method for accessing group records when permitted.
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Cleveland Clinic lays out its health IT strategy for future
Published March 14 2018, 7:23am EDT
The Cleveland Clinic’s plans for the future will depend on digital platforms such as telemedicine, data analytics and artificial intelligence, as the $8 billion healthcare organization looks beyond its core electronic health record system capabilities, according to new president and CEO Tom Mihaljevic, MD.
“Digital technology will allow us to deliver smarter, more affordable and more accessible” care, said Mihaljevic during his first State of the Clinic address. “The Cleveland Clinic has always been an early adopter, beginning with our electronic medical records. But now, we have to take technology even more seriously. We have to go for even more transformational technologic adoption.”
Mihaljevic, who succeeded Toby Cosgrove in January, noted that telemedicine is the health system’s fastest growing clinical offering through Express Care Online, an app that runs on smartphones, tablets and desktop computers to connect with healthcare providers.
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Results of the 2018 HIMSS Leadership Survey Confirm CIOs’ Focus on Clinical Outcomes Improvement—and Cybersecurity
March 8, 2018
by Mark Hagland
The HIMSS Leadership Survey finds consistency of concerns in 2018, compared to in 2017
While patient safety, clinical informatics, data analytics, and improving quality outcomes remain top of mind among hospital-based healthcare IT leaders, cybersecurity and data privacy and security issues have risen nearly to the top of the list of concerns of those leaders. That’s what the results of the 2018 HIMSS U.S. Leadership and Workforce Survey, released Tuesday, during HIMSS18, indicate.
The leaders of the Chicago-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society released those results during the annual HIMSS Conference, being held at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas this week. That survey polled 224 healthcare providers (81 percent of whom work in hospitals, 6 percent of whom work in ambulatory care settings, and 13 percent of whom work in nursing homes), and also 145 vendor executives and consultants.
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Industry stakeholders see cloud-based collaboration as next step in FDA’s digital health overhaul
by Evan Sweeney
Mar 14, 2018 11:20am
Pleased with the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) focus on reimagining digital health oversight, industry stakeholders have some thoughts about how the agency should move those efforts forward.
One of those ideas includes the creation of an “integrated online collaboration capability,” a cloud-based platform where manufacturers could submit applications and allow other participating companies to access information on approvals and adverse events.
That approach was fleshed out in a report released by Deloitte this week based on a two-day session with industry stakeholders, startups, patient advocacy groups and FDA regulators. A potential framework emerged from that discussion that emphasized the need for regulators to provide a clear regulatory pathway that uses a risk-based approach and the ability to analyze real-world data from multiple sources.
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Industry Voices—The future of digital health depends on how well it improves patient engagement
Mar 14, 2018 11:30am
The success of digital health ultimately relies less on advanced technology than on whether or not it improves an individual’s health and their ability to engage in their own health.
Take telemedicine. At Spectrum Health, we’ve seen an enormous increase in the use of telemedicine. In a few years, more individuals will see their doctors virtually than in the doctor’s office or hospital.
It’s not just a more efficient and cost-effective way to care for people. Telemedicine offers greater convenience and better access for everyone and sometimes it’s the only way to provide much-needed care.
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Hospitals investing in clinical surveillance tools, but remain skeptical of vendor claims
Spyglass survey uncovers varying degrees of understanding which tools can be used for early warning and predictive indicators to prevent adverse health events.
March 13, 2018 12:50 PM
Hospital leaders said clinical surveillance technology is essential to effectively monitoring high-risk patients, according to a new survey conducted by Menlo Park, California-based Spyglass Consulting Group. At the same time, however, respondents also indicated that they are wary of claims made by technology vendors, particularly those with black box solutions.
The researchers found that health systems are investing in clinical surveillance technology to help doctors, nurses and other care team members better monitor patients susceptible to worsening or life-threatening conditions. Among tools hospitals and health systems are adopting to better monitor high-risk patients are: Extending EHR’s capabilities; providing real-time access to clinical and non-clinical data from multiple data sources across the organization; customizing algorithms to hospital-based protocols, and employing data analytics capable of detecting a wide range of patient deteriorating conditions.
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Healthcare IT Leaders Share Learnings from Recent Hurricanes
March 9, 2018
by Mark Hagland
Healthcare IT Leaders from Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas shared insights on the devastation of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria
What can be learned from natural disasters, from the healthcare IT standpoint? As it turns out, a lot can. At a session held on Wednesday during HIMSS18, held this week at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, healthcare IT leaders from different communities shared their perspectives on some of what happened during and after Hurricanes Irma, Maria, and Harvey last year.
As the session description of Session 64, “Learning from the Devastating Effects of Three Hurricanes: The Critical Role of Health IT,” summarized it, “During the 2017 hurricane season, Mother Nature launched an all-out assault on portions of Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. With harsh winds, heavy rain resulting in historic flooding, and the aftermath that affected every aspect of human existence, there are lessons for all to learn regardless of the type of natural disaster. From a health IT perspective, many prepare for a potential disaster across infrastructure, communications, and alternatives to patient care delivery that organizations hope never occur. However, in the case of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, it affected every aspect of healthcare operations.”
José L. Abrams Guzmán, CIO and CTO at Servicios de Salud Episcopales, a health system based in Ponce, and anchored by Hospital San Lucas Ponce, a 161-bed community hospital, shared with the audience the devastating experience of Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in September, just days after Hurricane Irma had hit the island. “We have 3.4 million people in Puerto Rico,” he noted. “Being an island presents a lot of challenges, because of the distance, and also around health services.”
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Philips introduces AI platform for healthcare
New suite brings tools designed for doctors, clinicians and hospital managers, the company said.
March 13, 2018 02:32 PM
Amsterdam-based healthcare technology giant Royal Philips has introduced HealthSuite Insights.
The package includes technologies to support the adoption of analytics and artificial intelligence in healthcare. It also offers tools and technologies to build, maintain, deploy and scale AI technology, according to the company.
Phillips executives said Insights Marketplace, for instance, curates artificial intelligence technology from Philips and others. AI-based work can help improve patient outcomes and care efficiency, but it can also be time consuming and expensive.
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Next up for EHRs: Vendors adding artificial intelligence into the workflow
Leading electronic health record vendors at HIMSS18 signaled intentions to incorporate AI and machine learning into EHRs and other tools currently being developed.
By Tom Sullivan
March 13, 2018 12:03 PM
Artificial intelligence and machine learning permeated HIMSS18 such that the dynamic duo was just about everywhere in Las Vegas last week.
From expected experts such as long-time Google executive Eric Schmidt to surprise speakers, notably White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner, discussing it on stage, the promise was palpable, the use cases more numerous than ever before.
Add EHR vendors to that roster. Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks and Epic revealed big plans for adding AI into the workflow in forthcoming iterations of their electronic health records platforms.
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Diagnostic Errors Lead ECRI's Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns
Steven Porter, March 14, 2018
The annual list released this week includes health IT and opioids among other timely topics.
The nonprofit ECRI Institute released its annual list of Top 10 patient safety concerns for healthcare organizations.
Although the 2018 list includes a number of particularly timely topics, including opioid safety and the incorporation of health IT, the top slot went to a timeless topic: diagnostic errors.
Gail M. Horvath, MSN, RN, CNOR, CRCST, said miscommunication is a common problem, but it's often not the only factor contributing to diagnostic errors.
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Data analysis shows ICU scores accurate in predicting risk of death
Published March 13 2018, 7:25am EDT
Using clinical data from more than 200 hospital intensive care units, Philips Healthcare has shown that three ICU risk scores—designed for different purposes—performed well as a marker of severity of illness at admission and throughout the ICU stay.
The analysis of de-identified data from more than 560,000 ICU patient stays contributed by 333 ICUs, covering almost 39 million patient-hours of ICU care, reveal that it is possible for risk models to perform well even when deployed for uses other than what they were originally intended.
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VA study of wearables, AI shows promise for heart failure patients
The research evaluated how AI-based personalized physiology analytics could be applied to wearable biosensor data to predict when a patient might be at risk of hospitalization.
By Bill Siwicki
March 12, 2018 02:43 PM
A new study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, applied wearable biosensors to post-acute heart failure patients and deployed FDA-cleared analytics from vendor physIQ to detect vital sign anomalies.
It demonstrated promising predictive power for artificial intelligence-based analytics in terms of sensitivity, specificity and early warning lead time – suggesting the potential to transform to a proactive, personalized care model for at-risk patients, investigators from the Utah School of Medicine and the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System announced.
The report, "Continuous Wearable Monitoring Analytics Predict Heart Failure Decompensation: The LINK-HF Multi-Center Study," evaluated how AI-based personalized physiology analytics could be applied to wearable biosensor data to predict when a patient might be at risk of hospitalization or an acute care event.
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Diagnostic errors, opioid safety top ECRI's top 10 patient safety priorities for 2018
by Matt Kuhrt
Mar 13, 2018 9:55am
Healthcare facilities looking to prioritize their patient safety efforts should start by focusing on diagnostic errors and opioid safety, according to the ECRI Institute.
Those measures led the organization’s list of the top 10 patient safety concerns for 2018. The ECRI Institute develops its annual list through a review of event reports and root-cause analyses from its members and intends for hospitals to use the information in support of their individual efforts to identify and mitigate patient safety issues.
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Health Plan Leaders Discuss HIE Data and the Value Proposition for Payers
March 12, 2018
by Heather Landi
As health information exchange (HIE) organizations continue to evolve, HIE leaders are focused on expanding services and providing data analytics and business intelligence tools to providers and health plans. Many provider organizations view local, regional and even national HIEs as important partners for data sharing for population health management and care coordination.
During the HIMSS18 Conference in Las Vegas last week, there were several educational sessions focused on the value proposition of HIE data for providers and payers. During two separate sessions focused on HIEs and interoperability, two health plan leaders shared how their organizations are leveraging HIE data to improve quality measures, care management and to address gaps in care.
Newly evolving HIE services are creating opportunities for health plans and providers to improve transitions in care, particularly for underserved populations. Philadelphia-based AmeriHealth Caritas is a managed care organization that serves 5.7 million members who receive care through government-funded programs in 17 states and the District of Columbia.
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https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/ehrs/7-most-helpful-types-of-ehr-information-for-patients.html
7 most helpful types of EHR information for patients
Forty-four percent of U.S. residents have accessed their EHR, while 32 percent say they do not have an EHR, according to Accenture's 2018 Consumer Survey on Digital Health.
The survey includes responses from 2,301 adult U.S. residents.
While a majority of survey respondents — 36 percent — say their primary reason for accessing their EHR is to stay informed, 19 percent admit they want EHR access because they are curious, and 18 percent want to make sure their record is accurate.
When asked what they consider the most helpful EHR information, respondents reported the following:
• Lab work and blood test results: 67 percent
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NHS boards to link up health and social care data in Scotland
Owen Hughes
14 March 2018
A shared care record project is underway in Scotland to link up patient data from four of the country’s health boards.
From early 2019, NHS Highland, NHS Grampian, NHS Orkney and NHS Shetland will be able to share information across primary, secondary and social care systems via on online platform provided by Orion Health.
The project will allow healthcare providers in the north of Scotland view data on patients throughout the region, with the view of providing better joined-up care to people living in the country’s remote regions.
A first phase will focus on enabling clinicians to access acute patient information and will involve the development of shared care record based on Orion Health’s Population Health platform.
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‘We took a broken system and just broke it completely’
Trump touted a project to make veterans’ health care seamless, but some doctors say it’s a disaster.
By ARTHUR ALLEN
03/08/2018 05:05 AM EST
President Donald Trump last year hailed a multibillion-dollar initiative to create a seamless digital health system for active duty military and the VA that he said would deliver “faster, better, and far better quality care.”
But the military’s $4.3 billion Cerner medical record system has utterly failed to achieve those goals at the first hospitals that went online. Instead, technical glitches and poor training have caused dangerous errors and reduced the number of patients who can be treated, according to interviews with more than 25 military and Veterans Affairs health IT specialists and doctors, including six who work at the four Pacific Northwest military medical facilities that rolled out the software over the past year.
Four physicians at Naval Station Bremerton, in the Puget Sound, one of the first hospitals to go online, described an atmosphere so stressful that some clinicians quit because they were terrified they would hurt patients, or even kill them. Prescription requests came out wrong at the pharmacy. Physician referrals failed to go through to specialists. Physicians were unsure how to do basic things such as request lab reports.
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Teaching AI to Distinguish Between Clinical Findings Produces 91% Accuracy Rate
Alexandra Wilson Pecci, March 13, 2018
A new study suggests that automated methods can be used to identify findings in radiology reports.
Before physicians and researchers earned their degrees and titles, they all had to do the same thing: Learn. That's also true for artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
If AI is to live up to its potential for performing tasks such as helping radiologists interpret imaging studies, researchers must determine the best ways for machines to learn how to do so.
A group of researchers has just published a study in the journal Radiology that examined the best ways for computer software to be "taught" the difference between normal and abnormal X-ray, CT scan, or MRI findings. Such a building block is needed to eventually develop AI tools to interpret scans and diagnose conditions.
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Survey: Patients are comfortable engaging doctors digitally, but not with sharing data
However, add incentives and that number soars, finds an Ernst & Young survey released at HIMSS18.
By Bill Siwicki
March 09, 2018 11:25 AM
Patients and physicians both are ready to engage with one another using digital tools, according to a new Ernst & Young national survey released at HIMSS18 this week.
The survey found 54 percent of consumers said they are comfortable contacting their physician digitally and further expressed interest in using technology such as at-home diagnostic testing (36 percent), using a smartphone or connected device for information sharing (33 percent) and video consultations (21 percent).
There is widespread agreement among physicians that digital technologies and data sharing will contribute effectively to the overall well-being of the population, the survey found. And 83 percent of physicians believe that increased patient-generated data from connected devices would benefit the overall quality of care and enable more personalized care plans.
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Health app adoption tripled since 2014, Accenture survey finds
Use of telemedicine has gone up as well, but not as dramatically, respondents say.
March 09, 2018 01:13 PM
LAS VEGAS -- New survey data out this week from Accenture shows that healthcare consumers are using more wearables and apps, and are more bullish on virtual care than ever before. But they also have high expectations for their health technology, which the industry may not be able to meet.
“One of the things we were really interested in this year is what is the relative level of consumer expectations, particularly because we know they’re being formed by experiences outside of healthcare,” Kaveh Safavi, MD, one of the authors of the report, told MobiHealthNews during HIMSS18. “And one of our hypotheses is that their experiences outside healthcare drive their expectations of how healthcare should be. That creates both an opportunity and a risk for the healthcare system.”
According to Accenture’s survey of 7,905 Americans aged 18 years and older, 33 percent of Americans use wearables, up from 26 percent two years ago. Forty-six percent use apps for healthcare, up from 36 in 2016. If you go back to 2014, wearables and health apps were used by 9 and 16 percent of respondents, respectively, which means that app adoption has tripled — and wearable adoption has nearly quadrupled — in four years.
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New technologies help seniors age in place and not feel alone
Mar 12, 2018 1:14pm
Nancy Delano, 80, of Denver has no plans to slow down anytime soon. She still drives to movies, plays and dinners out with friends. A retired elder care nurse who lives alone, she also knows that “when you reach a certain age, emergencies can happen fast.” So, when her son, Tom Rogers, talked to her about installing a remote monitoring system, she didn’t hesitate.
With motion sensors placed throughout the house, Rogers can see if his mom is moving around, if she’s sleeping (or not), if she forgot to lock the door and, based on a sophisticated algorithm that detects behavioral patterns, whether her activity level or eating habits have changed significantly, for instance.
“It gives both of us peace of mind, particularly as she ages and wants to live at home,” said Rogers, who lives near Washington, D.C., hundreds of miles away from her.
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Blood Pressure Check? There May Soon Be an App for That
WEDNESDAY, March 7, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Someday soon, a simple touch of a finger to a smartphone case might be enough to provide instant, accurate blood pressure readings.
That's the promise of new technology detailed by developers in the March 7 issue of Science Translational Medicine.
Researchers say they've invented a special phone case, using high-tech 3-D printing, that contains an embedded optical sensor on top of a "force" sensor.
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Half of ransomware victims who pay the ransom don't get their data back: 5 things to know
Only about half of the organizations that suffered a ransomware attack in 2017 recovered their data after paying the ransom, according to a CyberEdge Group survey.
The research and marketing firm spoke with nearly 1,200 IT security pros in 17 countries about their experiences with cyberattacks last year.
Here are five survey insights.
1. Seventy-seven percent of the organizations surveyed suffered a form of cyberattack in 2017, which is down from 79 percent in 2016. This marks the first time in five years the percentage of organizations who were hit by a cyberattack declined.
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Surescripts seeks to ease patient costs, physician hassles
Published March 12 2018, 7:50am EDT
Surescripts, a vendor of secure messaging and electronic prescribing software, has expanded its product line over the years to offer prior authorization transactions and patient medication and clinical history summaries.
Today, 90 percent of standard prescriptions and 14 percent of controlled substance prescriptions are processed electronically, and the company moves 4.8 million scripts daily, or almost 2 billion a year, says CEO Tom Skelton.
Now, the company has a new focus to not only provide connectivity but improve the accuracy of prescriptions. New this year is a product called Surescripts Sentinel that monitors scripts by checking 35 “pain points” to assure accuracy.
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Doctor Reviews Posted to Hospital Websites More Flattering Than Independent Sites
Alexandra Wilson Pecci, March 12, 2018
Researchers found physician reviews on hospital websites were more numerous and favorable than those posted on independent rating sites.
A study at Hospital for Special Surgery found a discrepancy between doctor reviews provided by hospital websites and those posted on independent physician rating websites, such as Healthgrades.com and Vitals.com.
Investigators found a much higher number of reviews and more favorable physician ratings overall on the hospital websites. The research was presented at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
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Enjoy!
David.
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