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.
The Data Security and Protection Toolkit, which replaces the previous Information Governance toolkit, has been designed to ensure that patient data is secure.
All organisations that have access to NHS patient data and systems, including NHS trusts, primary care and social care providers and commercial third parties, must complete the toolkit to provide assurance that they are practising good data security and that personal information is handled correctly.
A machine learning tool developed at Carnegie Mellon University uses big data from the electronic health record to accurately predict sepsis.
May 24, 2018 - Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Heinz College are applying a machine learning algorithm to big data in the electronic health record (EHR) to more accurately predict sepsis, one of the most dangerous and insidious hospital acquired conditions.
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New Cancer Treatments Lie Hidden Under Mountains of Paperwork
May 21, 2018
Dr. Nikhil Wagle thought he had a brilliant idea to advance research and patient care.
Dr. Wagle, an oncologist at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and his colleagues would build a huge database that linked cancer patients’ medical records, treatments and outcomes with their genetic backgrounds and the genetics of their tumors.
The database would also include patients’ own experiences. How ill did they feel with the treatments? What was their quality of life? The database would find patterns that would tell doctors what treatment was best for each patient and what patients might expect.
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HIT Think How to protect patient data that’s being shared widely
Published May 25 2018, 4:29pm EDT
Healthcare is a prime target for data breaches, and providers and life science firms will likely face more security risks as they increasingly interact directly with each other in the healthcare ecosystem.
According to Accenture, a healthcare data breach has affected one in every four Americans, and threats don’t appear to be slowing down. Security firm Symantec warns of a new hacker ring targeting large healthcare organizations in the U.S and elsewhere.
Healthcare is a prime target for cyber thieves because records are highly valuable. The Poneman Institute states that a healthcare record—including name, birthdate and Social Security number—can net $50 on the black market vs. $3 for credit card information, because of the health record’s ability to be used for a longer time before detection.
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May 22, 2018
Do Prescription Drug–Monitoring Programs Prevent Opioid Overdose Deaths?
A systematic review of the literature is inconclusive.
Escalating opioid-related deaths in recent years in the U.S. have prompted states to introduce prescription drug–monitoring programs (PDMPs) to deter opioid overprescribing, diversion (i.e., transfer of opioid drugs from intended patients to unintended users), and prescription misuse. In this systematic review of 17 observational studies, researchers assessed the effects of PDMP implementation on both fatal and nonfatal opioid overdoses.
Ten studies suggested that PDMPs might lower fatal opioid overdoses; however, 3 studies showed increases in heroin overdose deaths following PDMP implementation. Individual PDMP features that were associated with fewer opioid overdoses include data-sharing among states, mandatory provider review of PDMP data before prescribing opioids, proactive reporting of patients' controlled substance prescription histories to prescribers and medical boards, and updating data at least weekly.
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Next-gen patient engagement: Applied intelligence and omni-channel messaging
Hospitals are shaping always-on consumer experiences with cutting-edge digital health tools as well as scheduling apps, workflow tools and more ways to access care.
May 25, 2018 08:08 AM
Patient engagement and user experience is a goal high on the priority list for many hospitals and health systems that wish to enhance communication with consumers, better include patients in their care decisions and ultimately improve outcomes.
Information technology can help caregivers on the front lines of healthcare better engage people to nail down these ambitions. And the next generation of patient engagement IT will offer better and new tools and approaches to help caregivers and others aim high and hit the mark.
Enhanced messaging will bolster engagement
Better bidirectional messaging with members of a patient’s care team is a next-generation feature of patient engagement technology, said Brian Eastwood, an analyst at Chilmark Research, a healthcare IT consulting firm.
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EHR market share in flux as small hospitals seek platforms to suit their needs
New KLAS report tracks the ups and downs of more than 200 hospital contracts in 2017.
May 24, 2018 04:27 PM
Of the 216 hospitals that contracted for a new electronic health record system in 2017, a hefty 80 percent of them were smaller acute care sites with 200 or fewer beds, a new KLAS study shows. Those hospitals are making their mark on the EHR market, looking for specialized technology that meets their unique needs and tight budgets.
"These smaller hospitals are hungry for new technology but often resource poor; over half that signed a new contract in 2017 chose a less expensive or less resource-intensive platform – namely, athenahealth, MEDITECH, and the community deployment models from Cerner and Epic," said KLAS researchers.
As more sizable health systems increasingly consolidate around the broader offerings from Epic, Cerner and, to a lesser extent, Allscripts, small hospitals are forging their own path, looking for vendors whose products are best-suited to their own workflows.
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Older Healthcare OSes Open to Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities
The healthcare industry is the slowest industry in upgrading to Windows 10, meaning that many in healthcare are running older versions of Windows more susceptible to cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
May 23, 2018 - The healthcare industry is the slowest industry in upgrading to Windows 10, meaning that many in healthcare are running older versions of Windows more susceptible to cybersecurity vulnerabilities, according to the
latest data from Duo Security.
This is a major risk for healthcare firms since the
WannaCry ransomware that wreaked havoc last year in the healthcare industry
targeted computers running Windows 7 . Cyberattackers look for computers running older operating systems because they tend to have more vulnerabilities.
The data was collected from more than 10.7 million devices that use the Duo trusted access platform for authentication.
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Senate passes bill to broaden VA information sharing with providers
Published May 24 2018, 7:04am EDT
The U.S. Senate on Wednesday passed legislation by a vote of 92 to 5 that would significantly broaden information sharing between the Department of Veterans Affairs and non-VA healthcare providers.
The bipartisan VA Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (MISSION) Act of 2018, which was passed by the House last week and now heads to President Trump’s desk to be signed into law, calls for improving information sharing with community providers.
The American Medical Association praised Congress for its passage of the bill, noting that “every veteran deserves timely, accessible, high quality healthcare—whether within or outside the VA system” and that the legislation will ensure they have “continuity of care external to the VA’s medical network.”
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Personalized, focused training boosts chance of EHR satisfaction
Published May 24 2018, 4:03pm EDT
There’s more than one way to improve clinician acceptance and success with using clinical records systems, and simply throwing more online or formal training classes at them may actually lessen the chances for success.
Individualized training tailored to clinician needs, technical aptitude, learning styles and work situations is essential to get nurses and physicians to become enthusiastic users of clinical systems.
That was the common theme at several sessions Wednesday at the first-ever KLAS Arch Collaborative Learning Summit in Salt Lake City. KLAS developed the event to build off its survey methodology to find organizations that had high clinician acceptance and positive opinions of electronic medical records systems, and then had them present best practices for gaining clinician support.
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Digital health: Hospitals must keep pace or be exposed to risk, experts say
The two authors of The Law of Digital Health explain how evolving standards of care bring benefits and challenges that hospitals have to manage.
As the healthcare sector continues to shift into value-based care and consumers become more involved in the care process, telemedicine and big data will continue to hold a crucial role in advancing patient care.
Telemedicine has developed from a “shiny new toy” to “the standard of doing care,” said Lisa Schmitz Mazur, a partner at McDermott Will and Emery, who co-authored the book The Law of Digital Health with Bernadette Broccolo, also a partner at the law firm.
“Telemedicine is really becoming a significant game-changer,” said Mazur.
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Nurse burnout? Try telehealth, clinical decision support and analytics tools, expert says
Health IT can often contribute to frustrations, but smart and well-designed technology can offload work, streamline processes and generally make nurses' lives easier.
May 22, 2018 02:47 PM
Just like physicians, nurses can burn out. Healthcare is a highly demanding field, and sometimes nurses just hit a wall.
One of the things that can contribute to nurse burnout is health IT. Too much technology, demanding too much of a nurse's time and attention on a daily basis, can drive a nurse up the wall – especially if the tools are not designed well.
A
Vocera report conducted by HIMSS Analytics , in fact, found that among 150 participating clinical and IT workers, including doctors and nurses, report that so many interruptions from alerts, alarms, pagers, phone calls and texts create stress that, in turn, fuels burnout.
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HIT Think How to start implementing AI
Published May 23 2018, 2:49pm EDT
Artificial intelligence-led services, among others, are already permeating our lives, with many more business use cases being analyzed and new technologies developed.
As rapid advances begin to change industries, markets and the competitive landscape, how can a healthcare organization explore whether AI—and its branches of machine learning and deep learning—makes sense for implementation?
There's a lot of buzz, there are plenty of gray areas. Many executives are under the impression they'll have to invest in AI to stay competitive, but they don't yet know how AI would fit into their organization's business model. At the same time, there’s a plethora of companies, both established (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) and entrepreneurial (H2O.ai, DataRobot, Skytree) ready to help organizations attack problems with open-source and proprietary tools and methods and arrive at an informed recommendation for investment.
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ONC launches Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge
Published May 23 2018, 7:20am EDT
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has issued a challenge to the industry to identify potential solutions for helping providers report on the usability or safety of their electronic health record systems.
ONC’s Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge is a “multidisciplinary call to software developers, clinicians and innovators to create a tool that will make it easier for doctors, nurses and other care team members to efficiently and effectively report concerns about the usability or safety of EHRs to appropriate parties, such as the hospital or practice’s IT team, the EHR developer, and Patient Safety Organizations,” states an agency announcement.
According to ONC Chief Clinical Officer Andy Gettinger, MD, reporting on the safe use of health IT— particularly EHRs—continues to be a challenge for many providers.
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Subscribing to Your Patients — Reimagining the Future of Electronic Health Records
Katherine Choi, M.D., Yevgeniy Gitelman, M.D., and David A. Asch, M.D.
Nearly all U.S. health care systems and many physician practices have by now migrated from paper charts to electronic health records (EHRs). But though this shift could have been a transformative change, current EHRs are largely digital remakes of traditional systems, just as many early motion pictures were merely plays captured on celluloid. In time, movies began using on-location settings and special effects to make the two-dimensional screen deeper than the three-dimensional stage.
As compared with other digital transformations that have redefined the way we consume information, the effect of EHRs on clinicians’ engagement seems limited and effortful. Physicians in the hospital can keep up with feeds on the Philadelphia Eagles, Taylor Swift, and the price of Bitcoin without consulting a newspaper. Yet they must still go to the chart to check on their patients. What would it be like to instead subscribe to Ms. Jones in room 328?
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Population Health Management – Advisory Series, May 2018
By Owen Hughes – Digital Health
Population health management is often touted as an important concept for the NHS, and key to ensuring its sustainability. But, as Owen Hughes reports, there will be barriers to overcome along the way – not least the challenges of linking previously disparate datasets.
As the NHS strives for sustainability, and technology gallops on, there has been an outpouring of new digital solutions designed to alleviate pressures on healthcare staff. Most fall into either the category of automating processes or that of empowering patients to take better care of their own health.
But population health management – a concept long touted as important for the NHS – touches a little on both.
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Precision medicine paradox: Tech outpacing policy
That burdens hospitals with the responsibility to ensure affordability, access and ethics to avoid making a broken healthcare system even worse.
May 22, 2018 10:45 AM
Precision medicine is the great healthcare promise of today and the future. Successful individual treatments regimens and research programs, at
large academic medical centers and
community hospitals alike, are already underway and saving lives. And with large-scale initiatives such as the National Institutes of Health's All of Us research program, which kicked off earlier this month, that bold vision will only grow in its potential to improve the health of patients and populations. Right?
Well, yes, but. It's complex. Without policies in place, there are major mistakes that hospitals, researchers, clinicians and policymakers must avoid to get this right. That point stuck with me among all the optimism here at the HIMSS Precision Medicine Summit in the nation's capital late last week.
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HIMSS releases free interoperability environmental scan
Hospitals can use the tool to assess connectivity options such as Epic’s Care Everywhere, Carequality, CommonWell, the Sequoia Project, others.
May 22, 2018 08:43 AM
The free tool comes as health IT shops grapple with more than a dozen EHRs running in-house, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health has retooled its efforts to focus on enabling interoperability and health information exchange, and more and more hospitals are turning to Carequality, CommonWell and others to share patient data outside their four walls.
“We now have a better understanding of who exists, how they differ, how they’re similar and how they’re collaborating,” said Katie Crenshaw, Manager of Informatics at HIMSS. “The whole point is to make it easier for hospitals to gather information people keep hearing about.”
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Patients want providers with strong online presence
Published May 21, 2018
Dive Brief:
· Digital tools and web presence play key roles when patients select a provider, Doctor.com said in a
new healthcare customer experience study . In fact, two-thirds of patients said they will choose a provider because of a strong online presence.
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4 key recommendations for increasing physician engagement with the EHR
Written by Julie Spitzer | May 21, 2018 |
The economic realities in the current healthcare environment often push leaders to focus on productivity and cost-cutting measures that all too often add to a physician's growing list of responsibilities despite their well-thought intentions.
Suffering from the day-to-day burdens of increasing documentation demands and changing technology tools — brought on by health systems' desire to stay financially fit, as well as regulatory compliant — physicians are now more burnt out than ever, according to Rick Roesemeier, manager at ECG Management Consultants. This is forcing many to reduce their clinical availability in an effort to manage a better work-life balance.
Coupled with the U.S.' worsening clinician shortage, healthcare organizations need to rethink the ways they manage their practice operations to better support and engage their physicians, or else they will face staffing issues that will complicate their abilities to deliver high-quality patient care.
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Study predicts patients' disease risks using emergency contacts
Written by Jessica Kim Cohen | May 21, 2018 | Print |Email
Emergency contact information housed in EHRs may be able to help predict a patient's risk for various hereditary conditions, according to a study published in the journal
Cell .
A team of researchers from Columbia University, Mount Sinai Health System and NewYork-Presbyterian, all based in New York City, analyzed 2 million EHRs from patients seen at three academic medical centers in New York. By reviewing standard emergency contact information patients provided at registration, the researchers were able to identify 7.4 million familial relationships.
Using EHR data from these family members, the researchers estimated a patient's likelihood of developing 500 hereditary conditions, such as Type 2 diabetes, obesity and celiac disease. The researchers' estimates were consistent between sites, according to the study.
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Most Healthcare Workers Admit to Non-Secure Healthcare Data Sharing
Most healthcare workers surveyed admit to non-secure healthcare data sharing using email.
May 21, 2018 - Most healthcare workers surveyed admit to non-secure healthcare data sharing using email.
A disturbing 87 percent of healthcare workers admit to using non-secure email to send sensitive information, including PHI, according to survey data provided to HealthITSecurity.com
Healthcare workers are 36 percent more likely to share regulated data such as patient information and credit card information via non-secure methods such as email than those working in financial services.
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HIT Think How to overcome common obstacles in IoT implementations
Published May 22 2018, 3:38pm EDT
Organizations are making massive investments in the Internet of Things and implementing those solutions across the enterprise. Connected devices can support care delivery, patient monitoring, improve information flow to clinicians, and optimize the supply chain, energy consumption or production.
In many cases, the organizations deploying more robust IoT processes are aware that IT must bear a heavy burden to integrate the devices. In some other cases, they may not understand what they are undertaking.
Organizations now realize that implementing interconnected, cross-platform IoT solutions can create data and, thus knowledge, that drives down costs. It is much faster and cost-effective within the enterprise to innovate within than by introducing a new product to market. It just needs to be done correctly.
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Providers lag behind hackers in trying to protect data
Published May 22 2018, 3:52pm EDT
Provider efforts to improve security remain underfunded and understaffed, according to Black Book Research in its annual look at healthcare’s threat environment.
The research firm surveyed nearly 2,500 security professionals from 680 provider organizations to identify vulnerabilities that continue to leave hospitals and physician practices open to attack. Nearly all—96 percent of the surveyed professionals—acknowledge that attackers continue to outpace providers in thwarting security.
Nearly all surveyed organizations had at least one breach since the third quarter of 2016, and half of them have had more than five breaches in that time period.
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Stop: Should You Be Releasing That PHI?
Alexandra Wilson Pecci, May 22, 2018
It's critical to understand the practicalities and pitfalls of non-HIM department release of PHI.
HIPAA's privacy rule has been in effect for 15 years, but this rule is worth reiterating at your healthcare organization to avoid expensive errors.
Just ask Fresenius Medical Care North America, for example, which in February
agreed to pay $3.5 million to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights for potential violations of HIPAA rules, or 21st Century Oncology, Inc., which in December
agreed to pay $2.3 million in lieu of potential civil money penalties due to its failure of protecting health records.
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Next-gen EHRs: Epic, Allscripts and others reveal future of electronic health records
EHRs will feature automation analytics, telemedicine, genomics and more in the not-too-distant future.
May 21, 2018 08:51 AM
The electronic health record is the lynchpin of healthcare information technology. And it has been evolving at a consistently quick pace in recent years.
Healthcare CIOs seeking to ensure they are making the best EHR investments today for the years ahead would do well to listen to experts in the field offering an insightful look ahead at the future of EHRs.
We checked in with Epic Systems President Carl Dvorak, Allscripts CEO Paul Black, an Accenture consultant and drchrono founder Daniel Kivatinos to get a sense of where big and smaller EHR vendors are headed.
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Tracking Tools for Food Allergy Prevention: Help or Hype?
Allergies to common foods
Over the past several years, .
Several food tracking smartphone applications have made identifying milder allergies and intolerances easier for individuals and clinicians. Instead of relying on memory or handwritten food diaries to determine what ingredient or additive is causing the problem, food trackers that are updated as you eat create a more accurate and time-sensitive mechanism of pinning down what foods may trigger symptoms.
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6 Simple Steps to Avoid Becoming a Cybercrime Statistic in 2018
Perry Chaffee
May 18th, 2018
We can all agree that 2017 was a brutal year for cybersecurity.
Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report identified passwords as the root cause of more than 81 percent of breaches in 2016 – an 18 percent increase from the previous year. And, it’s a safe guess that this year, the percentage will grow. At last year’s Blackhat Cybersecurity conference, Alex Stamos, the chief security officer of Facebook, reported that passwords are one of the biggest security challenges Facebook faces.
Cyber attacks been dominating headlines even since before the DNC hack. It’s time for widespread adoption of a secure and convenient replacement for passwords. However, we’re unlikely to see this happen within the next few months, so here are some protocols you can adopt to help your company from becoming a statistic.
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Senior living centers find new benefits in adopting electronic records
Published May 21 2018, 3:35pm EDT
Senior Housing Companies, which offers assisted living services and healthcare to individuals living in retirement communities, was dependent upon manual paper processing to manage its 17 senior living communities in Iowa. A few years ago, when Joy Laudick joined the organization as its director of clinical management, she knew it was needed to transition to electronic systems.
“Our processes were not standardized,” she recalls. “We wanted to have a single electronic health record along with revenue cycle management and customer relationship management software.”
Laudick came to Senior Housing Companies with previous experience in skilled living settings that used the PointClickCare electronic health record that includes revenue cycle management and customer relationship management software, so the company eventually decided to use the vendor to support senior living operations. The organization today comprises 25 living centers in Iowa, with four more centers opening soon.
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HIT Think How machine learning can drive clinical and operational improvements
Published May 21 2018, 3:21pm EDT
As the healthcare industry pivots toward enhancing the delivery of care, improving the efficiency of their business operations and advancing the quality of scientific discovery, many organizations are increasingly embracing machine learning as part of their overall clinical and financial strategy.
Enthusiasm for advanced cognitive computing in healthcare is on the rise as providers recognize the need for analytical tools to gain predictive and preventative insights. By using machine learning algorithms, healthcare organizations can glean patterns in patient data and diagnostic imaging that will help them treat and diagnose patients with greater accuracy, map care pathways and processes, reduce costs in care, and improve outcomes. Yet, the task of implementing machine learning projects comes with challenges.
Machine learning projects can be expensive. They require highly skilled data scientists and IT capabilities that hospitals with thin budgets often can’t afford. These initiatives also require significant technology infrastructure and computing power.
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VA signs $10B deal with Cerner, but implementation challenges still loom large
May 21, 2018 7:20am
After nearly a year of fits and starts, the Department of Veterans Affairs has finally signed a deal with Cerner to upgrade its EHR system.
The 10-year, $10 billion deal signed on Thursday represents one of the largest federal IT contracts. The move from the system’s customized VistA platform to an off-the-shelf EHR aligns the country’s largest health system with the Department of Defense, which has already begun integrating Cerner’s MHS Genesis system.
“With a contract of that size, you can understand why former Secretary Shulkin and I took some extra time to do our due diligence and make sure the contract does what the President wanted,” Acting VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a
statement .
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A computer system failure hit Sutter Health. Now, patients and nurses are concerned
By Cathie Anderson
Updated May 21, 2018 07:21 AM
In a video message to Sutter Health employees , Sutter Chief Executive Officer Sarah Krevans complimented the patience, thoroughness, commitment, compassion and resilience of employees, saying "all of this helped to ensure the continuity of high-quality, safe patient care."
"We will be reviewing every aspect of this event and taking seriously every recommendation for improvement," she said. "I also want to hear from all of you. I want to know what happened where you work."
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The AI Doctor Will See You Now
Artificial intelligence comes to the doctor’s office, helping identify disease, monitor heart activity, stave off seizures
By Christopher Mims
May 20, 2018 8:00 a.m. ET
Kimberly Bari had her first seizure in 2010 at age 26 and since then has had hundreds. Some rendered her unconscious, others left her confused and terrified. By 2016, her surgery- and drug-resistant condition led her to try something fewer than 2,000 people in the world have attempted: implanting a computer into her brain .
The NeuroPace Responsive Neurostimulation System “literally provides peace of mind I never imagined could exist,” she said. And, according to its makers, it would be impossible without a type of artificial intelligence known as machine learning.
Machine-learning algorithms accomplish tasks by training on a set of data, rather than being programmed by humans. NeuroPace Inc.’s engineers pattern-match patients’ neural activity to a database of two million recordings from the brains of other patients. Armed with the knowledge of what worked before, the system instructs the implant to stimulate users’ brains to interrupt a seizure at its onset.
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Theresa May plans NHS data revolution to fight cancer
Chris Smyth, Health Editor
May 21 2018, 12:01am, The Times
Artificial intelligence will be used to study patient data and spot cancer or dementia before people know they have it, Theresa May says in a speech to be given today.
The prime minister says that harnessing genetic information and medical records to create programs that diagnose disease at the earliest stage is crucial to the nation’s prosperity.
Doing so will require much wider use of NHS data to generate the kind of machine-learning capable of detecting patterns that indicate disease and will prompt scrutiny of how records are used for such research.
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Enjoy!
David.
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