October 18, 2018
by Heather Landi, Associate Editor
Many healthcare industry groups would like to see the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Reporting Program for health IT developers include a strong focus on patient safety-related usability, EHR training, transparency on EHR vendors’ cybersecurity practices as well as cost transparency.
This feedback came in response to a request for information (RFI) issued by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) in late August
seeking public input on reporting criteria under the EHR Reporting Program for health IT developers, as required by the 21
st Century Cures Act. The public comment period ended Oct. 17.
ONC issued the
RFI on criteria to measure the performance of certified electronic health record technology (CEHRT). The Cures Act requires that health IT developers report information on certified health IT as a condition of certification and maintenance of certification under the ONC Health IT Certification Program.
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FHIR supporters want feds to make the standard a requirement
Published October 19 2018, 7:28am EDT
As providers and vendors continue to embrace HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources to share health data, supporters are calling on federal agencies to make the standard a requirement.
Micky Tripathi, manager of the Argonaut Project, an industry-wide effort to accelerate the development and adoption of FHIR, contends that the open health data standard is now mature enough to be leveraged by the Department of Health and Human Services—specifically the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.
“When we started the Argonaut Project less than four years ago on the building blocks created by the SMART on FHIR program, we believed strongly in FHIR and (application programming interfaces), but we were concerned that the standard was too immature,” says Tripathi. “We were especially concerned that FHIR not become an ONC EHR certification requirement before the industry was ready for it.”
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HHS guidance helps doctors conduct risk assessments
Published October 19 2018, 3:16pm EDT
An updated Security Risk Assessment Tool aims to help providers and business associates identify risks to electronic protected heath information.
The tool, created by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information technology and the Office for Civil Rights, is designed for practices with up to 10 providers, along with their business associates, to understand their security posture and prevent data breaches.
Using the tool, providers and business associates can conduct an enterprisewide risk analysis covering the confidentiality, integrity and availability of electronic health information across all lines of business, in all facilities and in all locations, according to the agencies.
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Unauthorised access attempts detected on Singapore’s HealthHub portal
A total of 72 accounts were successfully logged in over a period of four days, according to the Health Promotion Board’s official statement.
October 18, 2018 02:38 AM
HealthHub, a one-stop portal and mobile application for Singaporeans to access a wide range of health content, rewards and e-services, which was launched in 2015, had experienced a series of unauthorised log-ins, according to the Health Promotion Board’s (HPB) recent statement. The portal is an initiative by the Ministry of Health, and Health Promotion Board, supported by Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS), the national technology agency for healthcare in Singapore.
HPB and IHiS had detected the unauthorised log-ins during investigations into unusual activities on the portal. The agencies had found “higher than usual attempted log-ins” to the HealthHub portal on four days – Sept 28, Oct 3, Oct 8 and Oct 9 – using more than 27,000 unique IDs or email addresses.
Although 98 per cent of the email addresses used were not related to existing HealthHub accounts and the log-in attempts were unsuccessful, 72 accounts were successfully logged in during those time periods. These accounts were subsequently locked and HPB had contacted the account holders to inform them of the suspicious activity, and to check if they had made the attempts themselves.
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FDA, DHS to increase collaboration on medical device security and framework
While the two federal agencies have worked together on vulnerability disclosures in the past, a new memorandum of agreement will improve coordination.
October 17, 2018 06:16 PM
The Food and Drug Administration and Department of Homeland Security signed a memorandum of agreement to improve coordination around medical device security, including a framework.
IMPACT
While the two federal agencies have worked together in the past to improve medical cybersecurity and vulnerability disclosures, the new agreement formalizes the process and the FDA and DHS relationship. The goal is to bolster coordination around potential or confirmed threats and/or flaws.
“As innovation in medical devices advances and more devices are connected to hospital networks or to other devices, ensuring that devices are adequately protected against cyber intrusions is paramount to protecting patients,” wrote FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.
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Given Access, Cancer Patients Read Their Doc's Notes
But Does Reading Equal Understanding?
Nick Mulcahy
October 17, 2018
The upside of providing cancer patients with easy access to their physicians' notes far outweighs any downside, according to a new exploratory study from a major US cancer center that has embraced the "OpenNotes" movement in medicine.
There is growing momentum to provide patients with easy access to their full electronic medical records in "real time," say the study authors, led by Narek Shaverdian, MD, a radiation oncologist who was a resident at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) during the study.
The Department of Radiation Oncology was one of the first departments at ULCA to adopt OpenNotes, a nonprofit initiative that encourages transparency and provides software that allows an institution's electronic medical records to be routed to a patient portal.
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NLP lags behind in reaping benefits of AI enthusiasm
Published October 18 2018, 4:23pm EDT
By most accounts, the top technology trend for this year is artificial intelligence, but one facet of AI has has been slow to take off is natural language processing.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a component of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand, interpret and manipulate human language, continues to advance as organizations look for ways to leverage human-to-machine communications for a variety of applications.
To date, the application of natural language technology in the enterprise has been underwhelming, said Leslie Joseph, principal analyst at Forrester Research. But this is likely to change, he said. Deep learning techniques for NLP, such as distributed representations, are improving both the generation as well as the understanding ends of NLP.
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HIT Think The best cyber security defense: Thinking like an adversary
Published October 18 2018, 4:26pm EDT
A line from Mr. Robot’s Ray Heyworth sums up the failure of much of today’s cybersecurity thinking: “Control is about as real as a one-legged unicorn taking a leak at the end of a double rainbow.”
Enterprises need to shift their mindset from thinking primarily from a defensive perspective to thinking about how an attacker would infiltrate their system and use that knowledge to inform their defensive posture. But what does it mean to think like an adversary? What does this actually look like in practice?
Enterprises know they have a “security problem,” but many have only a vague understanding of how to solve it. They might think that AI could help prevent malicious access to their network and help safeguard their sensitive data but aren’t sure about the particulars (or even the how). There is a simplistic conversation going on about security in the industry that centers on what security tools are on the network and what function they serve. It’s simplistic because it isn’t the whole story.
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Why do digital health startups keep failing?
The “move fast and break things” approach that works in tech doesn’t translate well to healthcare. Instead, digital health startups should try need-driven innovation.
By Paul Yock
A decade ago, a wave of companies promised to transform people’s health by allowing them to track data about their eating, sleep, exercise, and other habits. One hot startup of that moment, Zeo, raised more than $30 million from investors to develop a headband that tracked users’ sleep patterns and an accompanying app to serve as their personal “sleep coach.” Despite devoted users and buzz about its product in publications like
Wired and
Popular Science, Zeo quietly went out of business a few years later.
Zeo is just one of many digital health startups whose early promise failed to materialize into lasting impact. Money continues to pour into the space–to the tune of nearly $12 billion in investment in 2017–but few companies have cracked the code for delivering technologies that truly transform healthcare. Why?
Many digital health companies fall short because they apply a strategy to healthcare that was developed and refined in the tech sector, an entirely different industry with its own set of rules.
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HIPAA lets providers text patients, but is it secure?
As texting between patients and providers becomes more common, it’s imperative that providers consider the right platform to use and other security features to protect patient data.
October 17, 2018
Texting between doctors and patients has become more commonplace in recent years. But before the two parties start sharing every intimate detail, experts urge providers to take a step back and consider security.
HIPAA guidelines
But a lot of regulations comes down to patient consent and their understanding of the risks involved with texting with a provider.
“When it comes to texting with a patient, if a patient understands the risk of the unsecured communication and consents to communicating in that manner, then the provider can communicate in that manner,” said Erin Whaley, a partner at Troutman Sanders law firm and HIPAA specialist.
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Kaiser Permanente Sees Good Results With Video-Based Telehealth
Researchers with the California-based health system found high patient satisfaction rates and positive outcomes in an analysis of video-based telehealth encounters between 2015 and 2017.
October 16, 2018 - One of the nation’s largest health systems is seeing success with video-based telehealth, though only a small fraction of their patients are using the virtual care platform.
Researchers at California-based Kaiser Permanente analyzed 201,383 scheduled video visits between 2015 and 2017, involving 152,809 patients, and found that 93 percent of patients who responded to the survey said the connected care encounter met their needs.
They reported their results
in a letter to the
New England Journal of Medicine.
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Patients likely to suffer when EHR systems can't talk to each other, researcher says
Written by Megan Knowles | October 16, 2018 | Print | Email
As physicians look for ways EHRs can be used to improve patient care, limited access to patient data due to incompatible EHR platforms threatens those improvements, a study published in
BMC Health Services Research found.
"Without interoperable systems, the full potential benefits of adopting electronic health records cannot be achieved,"
said Anabel Castillo, a researcher in the department of engineering and public policy at Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University. "Patient-centered treatment requires collaboration, coordination and accountability. This can only be accomplished when medical information is available for exchange."
The study examined factors that lead hospitals to adopt EHRs and how their vendor choice can affect the way patient health information is shared.
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FDA updates medical device premarket guidance to include cybersecurity recommendations
Oct 17, 2018 11:58am
Updated guidance issued by the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday includes several new cybersecurity recommendations for medical devices.
Among those changes, the FDA is asking manufacturers to include a list of hardware and software components within each device—known as a “bill of materials”—that could be susceptible to a cyberattack.
Earlier this month, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D.,
hinted that an update would be coming as part of a broader effort to address what has become a growing concern for the agency. In an increasingly connected healthcare environment, legacy devices have been pegged as a weak link in the ecosystem.
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Study: Virtual physical therapy could significantly reduce postsurgical costs
Oct 17, 2018 3:40pm
Physical therapy is a crucial part of recovery after orthopedic surgery, and a new study suggests that patients may do just as well meeting with a virtual therapist.
Researchers at Duke Clinical Research Institute
piloted a digital physical therapist tool with 143 patients who underwent total knee replacement at four different providers. A control group of 144 patients were prescribed traditional physical therapy.
The virtual therapist, named VERA (or Virtual Exercise Rehabilitation Assistant) and developed by Reflexion Health, guides patients through exercises prescribed by a physical therapist. The tech also monitors patients’ performance in those exercises, allowing clinicians to tailor the recovery plan to their needs.
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AMA issues 12-step 'playbook' for digital health implementation
Oct 17, 2018 12:48pm
The nation’s largest provider group unveiled a new “playbook” on Wednesday designed to help physicians implement a variety of new digital tools.
The American Medical Association (AMA) released its
Digital Health Implementation Playbook at the Connected Health Conference in Boston. The 12-step resource includes fundamental steps to digital health implementation along with more focused guidance for remote patient monitoring.
"Implementing digital health technology has been a challenge for those without a clear course to success," AMA Chair-elect Jesse Ehrenfeld, M.D., said in a
statement. "The AMA is committed to making technology an asset, not a burden, and the Playbook provides the medical community with widespread access to a proven path for implementing digitally enabled health and care.”
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UnitedHealth plans to roll out a new EHR offering for consumers and providers by the end of 2019
Oct 16, 2018 11:26am
Insurance giant UnitedHealth has its sights on a new market: electronic health records.
UnitedHealth is preparing to launch a “fully individualized, fully portable” electronic health record in the coming year, CEO David Wichmann said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday morning, during which he repeatedly emphasized the company’s digital capabilities as a key to long-term growth.
Details about the product are still thin, but Wichmann said the company plans to leverage its mobile wellness platform Rally to launch a personal health record to the insurer’s 50 million fully benefited members. UnitedHealth has been building out its Rally offering for several years and now has 20 million registered users.
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Providers turn to analytics to keep patients healthier
Published October 17 2018, 7:34am EDT
Anyone who’s shopped on the e-commerce juggernaut Amazon.com knows that the company analyzes customers’ shopping habits and serves up suggestions for what they might like to buy next. If you’re looking at one product, it can tell you how many customers bought a different item or what they bought in addition to that item.
“Why can’t we do that in healthcare?” wonders Charles “Chuck” Christian, vice president of technology and engagement at the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE).
Organizations are “learning now how to standardize [data] and normalize it using good standards and being able to use that data to improve the quality of care and the quality of the outcomes,” Christian says. The next step is to serve it up to physicians before they even need it to get patients the right care at the right time and to use predictive analytics to keep populations of patients healthy.
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Sequoia Project starts forum to delve into interoperability issues
Published October 17 2018, 5:20pm EDT
The Sequoia Project is launching a forum on interoperability, inviting experts to identify, prioritize and collaborate on pressing challenges.
Sequoia, which operates a national health information exchange, has data exchange technology in 75 percent of the nation’s hospitals and supports secure exchange of records for more than 120 million patients.
“The pipes to enable health information exchange have been laid by organizations like Carequality, CommonWell, DirectTrust, eHealth Exchange and health information exchange organizations,” says Mariann Yeager, CEO at Sequoia. “However, there are remaining real and perceived barriers to making exchange more effective and seamless—but not for long.”
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HIT Think Why personalized incentives are the key to patient compliance
Published October 17 2018, 5:31pm EDT
In 2009, mostly to fund the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the U.S. government increased the tax on cigarettes from 39 cents to a $1.01. What followed was a demonstration of what we now commonly call behavioral economics.
When taxes drove the price of cigarettes up, teenage smoking rates fell 10 percent, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and overall smoking dropped more than 8 percent, the most significant dip in smoking since 1932. The increase-taxes approach to cigarettes is now commonly used in all 50 states as a means of both generating revenue and reducing the number of smokers. Indeed, policy success has led to similar suggestions regarding soda as diabetes rates across the country skyrocket.
In this way, behavioral economics, for which Richard Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics, has wormed its way into the fabric of our lives, creating more focus on incentives and disincentives as engines of behavioral change.
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Your next doctor’s appointment might be with an AI
A new wave of chatbots are replacing physicians and providing frontline medical advice—but are they as good as the real thing?
“My stomach is killing me!”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” says a female voice. “Are you happy to answer a few questions?”
And so the consultation begins. Where’s the pain? How bad is it? Does it come and go? There’s some deliberation before you get an opinion. “This sounds like dyspepsia to me. Dyspepsia is doctor-speak for indigestion.”
Doctor-speak, maybe, but it’s not a doctor speaking. The female voice belongs to Babylon, part of a wave of new AI apps designed to relieve your doctor of needless paperwork and office visits—and reduce the time you have to wait for medical advice.
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IT glitch hit GPs as thousands died from winter illnesses
Helen Puttick, Scottish Health Correspondent
October 17 2018, 12:01am, The Times
Doctors are urging elderly patients to get vaccinated after last winter’s jump in flu cases
A computer glitch left hundreds of Scottish doctors unable to see the true extent of a flu outbreak as winter deaths rose to the highest level for almost 20 years.
A report has revealed details about the crisis that hit the NHS in Scotland last December. It has led to fresh concern about a shortage of the most effective flu vaccine for the elderly this year.
National Records of Scotland found that 23,137 people died last winter — more than in any winter since the turn of the millennium.
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Policy mistakes to avoid when choosing cyber insurance
Part three in our cyber insurance series highlights red flags and common mistakes to avoid when shopping for a cyber policy.
October 16, 2018 03:37 PM
It’s every healthcare organization’s nightmare to get the call that their data has been breached or hacked. As a result, many have turned to cyber insurance to protect assets and business operations.
As cyber policies and carriers lack a universal policy, there’s an even greater worst case scenario: An organization is breached, and the policy doesn’t cover what the leaders thought it did. Now, not only is the healthcare provider strapped with the burden of the breach, it wasted money on a useless cyber insurance policy.
To get a better grasp on how to choose the right policy, Healthcare IT News asked attorney Matthew Fisher, partner with Mirick O’Connell, and Jane Harper, Henry Ford Health System’s director of privacy and security risk management, to outline the biggest policy mistakes -- and how to avoid them.
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Apple Donates Smartwatches for mHealth Study on Eating Disorders
The University of North Carolina will be using the Apple Watch 4 in an mHealth study targeting people affected by binge-eating disorder and bulimia nervosa.
October 15, 2018 - Researchers at the University of North Carolina are launching an mHealth study aimed at improving care management for people living with eating disorders.
The Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders, part of the UNC School of Medicine’s School of Psychiatry, will be handing out 1,000 donated Apple Watches in a connected health project to study genetic factors behind binge-eating disorder (BED) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Participants will use the mHealth wearable to track eating and health habits over a 30-day span, then submit saliva and bacteria samples to digital diagnostics company uBiome for genetic analysis.
The
Binge Eating Genetics INitiative (BEGIN) program targets a psychological disorder that affects more than 30 million Americans. Researchers hope that by tracking the daily activities of those living with this condition, they can better understand how to diagnose and treat it.
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It takes healthcare organizations 55 days to detect a breach, survey finds
Written by Jessica Kim Cohen | October 15, 2018 | Print | Email
Although healthcare organizations tend to identify breaches more quickly than companies in other industries, they take longer to contain the attack, according to a recent
survey sponsored by IBM.
IBM tapped the independent research firm Ponemon Institute to conduct the survey of nearly 500 companies for a report on data breach costs. The survey included 2,634 employees from 477 companies across 17 industries worldwide, all of which had experienced a data breach that compromised at least 2,500 records.
Here are five insights into data breach cost and recovery:
1. The industries with the largest proportion of data breaches in IBM's survey were financial services (16 percent), services (15 percent), industrial and manufacturing (14 percent), and technology (13 percent). Healthcare organizations comprised just 1 percent of data breaches.
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Algorithms begin to show practical use in diagnostic imaging
Published October 16 2018, 7:26am EDT
Algorithms based on machine learning and deep learning, intended for use in diagnostic imaging, are moving into the commercial pipeline.
However, providers will have to overcome multiple challenges to incorporate these tools into daily clinical workflows in radiology.
There now are numerous algorithms in various stages of development and in the FDA approval process, and experts believe that there could eventually be hundreds or even thousands of AI-based apps to improve the quality and efficiency of radiology.
The emerging applications based on machine learning and deep learning primarily involve algorithms to automate such processes in radiology as detecting abnormal structures in images, such as cancerous lesions and nodules. The technology can be used on a variety of modalities, such as CT scans and X-rays. The goal is to help radiologists more effectively detect and track the progression of diseases, giving them tools to enhance speed and accuracy, thus improving quality and reducing costs.
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Video App Improves Physician-Patient Communication, Engagement
Northwell neurologist develops app that enhances patient encounters and improves satisfaction scores.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Employs secure, HIPAA-compliant cloud-based technology, delivered in a consumer-friendly app.
· 90% of patients access app after appointments or discharge.
· HCAHPS and Press Ganey scores improved significantly for patients using the app.
Ten years ago, David Langer, MD, a
Northwell Health neurologist, began videotaping patient encounters so they could recall details of information exchanged following their visit. Today, his patients depart appointments with essentially a three- to five-minute highlight reel, delivered via
Playback Health, a smartphone app Langer helped create.
After the appointment, 90% of patients access the app and share the recording with family, friends, and other providers on their care team. The videos help patients understand and recall details that are often complicated. It allows them to review MRI, CAT scan, and other diagnostic images, accompanied by the audio of the physician explaining their problem and treatment. There is no extra charge to use the app.
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Innovative UT pilot develops platform to help providers adopt digital health tools
The idea is to create a connected ecosystem of care, given that "no single device, app, or piece of data in isolation that will deliver benefits to patients."
October 15, 2018 03:59 PM
Healthcare is complicated. There's no getting around it. Which is why hospital leaders should be extremely skeptical of individual technologies that say they can fix it, says Lynda Chin, MD, executive director for real-world education detection and intervention at The University of Texas System and professor at Dell Medical School.
The challenges of healthcare are "so big and complex that no little solution is going to solve them," said Chin. "We do need these innovative technologies to fill the gaps – but what we don't talk enough about is how do you integrate that back. Because the patient is not going to get what they need if it's not integrated and connected through every other component."
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Debunking the cybersecurity thought that humans are the weakest link
Experts at the HIMSS Healthcare Security Forum said the next phase of infosec should be to secure the human and put safety nets in place to protect them.
October 15, 2018 01:54 PM
Theresa Payton, CEO of Fortalice Solutions, speaking at the HIMSS Healthcare Security Forum in Boston on Monday.
BOSTON – The time has come to move beyond the security mantra "don't click on email links or open attachments and we'll all be safer."
"We've been saying that for 15 years and the strategy doesn't work," said Theresa Payton, CEO of Fortalice Solutions and former White House CIO said here on Monday at the HIMSS Healthcare Security Forum.
Instead, Payton said that she is still seeing business email compromises on the rise in healthcare.
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75% of patients research their condition before hospital visit + 5 other findings on tech use for health
Written by Kelly Gooch | October 12, 2018 | Print | Email
A recent survey from the
University of Phoenix shows patients are using technology to take control of their health.
The September survey, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of University of Phoenix, involved 2,006 U.S. adults. Of those surveyed, 1,215 had been a patient in the last three months.
Six findings:
1. Eighty-six percent of respondents said they feel the more information they can provide about their condition, the better treatment they'll receive from their healthcare professional.
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HIMSS Analytics: The state of blockchain, cloud, EHR adoption & more
Written by Jessica Kim Cohen | October 11, 2018 | Print | Email
HIMSS Analytics, a subsidiary of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, outlined nationwide adoption of major health IT trends in its State of the Market 2018 report.
The report, compiled by HIMSS Analytics Executive Vice President Blain Newton, detailed market insights related to blockchain, cloud computing, EHRs, precision medicine and telehealth, among other health IT segments.
Here are five highlights from the report:
1. Blockchain. The plurality of hospitals (45.3 percent) are still learning about blockchain and have not deployed any related programs. However, 55 percent said it is "somewhat likely" they complete a blockchain proof-of-concept or pilot in the next 24 months, followed by 17 percent of whom said it was "very likely."
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We’d be crippled by a cyberattack on our utilities
October 14
Arthur H. House is chief cybersecurity risk officer in the state of Connecticut. He previously served in the intelligence community from 2009 to 2012 and as chairman of Connecticut’s utilities commission from 2012 to 2016. His views are his own.
Foreign states are breaching the security perimeters of America’s public utilities. In Connecticut, utilities have reported days in which they detected and deterred
more than a million probes to their operating systems, many from foreign actors. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Oct. 2 referred to Russia-linked hacking as an effort to “
prep the battlefield” for an attack.
Meanwhile,
Karen Evans, the assistant secretary for cybersecurity, energy security and emergency response at the Energy Department, testified Sept. 27 that our energy infrastructure has become a primary target for hostile cyber-actors. She
warned that, “energy cybersecurity and resilience has emerged as one of the Nation’s most important security challenges,” and added in response to a committee question that she is not confident our utilities are prepared to withstand such attacks, particularly from potent actors such as
Russia and North Korea.
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‘Payment Notification’ Is Top Healthcare Phishing Attack Subject
The term “Payment Notification” is the top healthcare phishing attack subject, appearing in more than half of healthcare phishing attack campaigns in 2018.
October 11, 2018 - The term “Payment Notification” is the top healthcare phishing attack subject, appearing in 58 percent of healthcare phishing attack campaigns in 2018, according to the
latest data from Cofense.
Other popular subjects in healthcare phishing attacks are “New Message in Mailbox” and “Attached Invoice.”
Cofense (formerly PhishMe) found that 7 percent of emails are malicious in healthcare, compared with 10 percent across industries.
The healthcare industry is an attractive target for phishing campaigns “because few industries collect more lucrative personal data: name, Social Security number, email address, home address, date of birth, and usually one or more credit card numbers,” Cofense related in its report
The State of Phishing Defense 2018.
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Executive Spotlight—DirectTrust CEO Scott Stuewe explains why interoperability has lost its meaning
Oct 15, 2018 11:50am
Scott Stuewe brings more than two decades with Cerner to his new role as CEO of DirectTrust.
Newly installed DirectTrust CEO Scott Stuewe has been in the health IT industry for more than two decades, and he’s burnt out on one particular buzzword: interoperability.
“I think the notion of interoperability leaves providers cold,” he told FierceHealthcare during a recent interview. “They don’t understand what that means.”
Now, Stuewe is leading an organization dedicated to solving that very problem. Founded in 2012 by recently departed CEO David Kibbe, DirectTrust is a nonprofit association helping 121 health IT and provider organizations securely exchange health records through a bidirectional “trust framework.” Stuewe, who spent 24 years at Cerner, replaced Kibbe as CEO in July.
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Providers must demand interoperability as part of strategy in buying IT
Published October 15 2018, 7:06am EDT
Healthcare interoperability can only be achieved on a large scale through the strategic acquisition of health information technology solutions and devices.
That’s the contention of a new National Academy of Medicine
report that cites the “suboptimal” nature of healthcare technology purchasing as a major barrier to the interoperable exchange of electronic health information.
“When it comes to procuring digital services for health and healthcare systems, interoperability is simply not yet an effectively structured component of either the supply or the demand equations, nor of the links between the two,” finds the NAM report. “In contrast to many other industries, the purchasers of healthcare technology have not fully leveraged their individual or collective purchasing power to require interoperability from the health technology marketplace.”
As a result, NAM contends that most electronic health records, medical devices and other IT systems are not interoperable.
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EHR Interoperability Should Drive Health IT Purchasing Decisions
NAM urged healthcare organizations to base health IT purchasing decisions largely on a system’s ability to enable EHR interoperability.
October 15, 2018 - Healthcare organizations should prioritize a system’s ability to facilitate EHR interoperability and seamless health data exchange when making health IT purchasing decisions, according to a
new publication from the National Academy of Medicine (NAM.)
The publication outlines a multi-stakeholder approach to achieving widespread healthcare interoperability through the strategic acquisition of health IT solutions and devices capable of facilitating health data exchange between facilities, within healthcare organizations, and at the point-of-care.
Healthcare industry experts from NAM, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Emory University, the Department of Defense (DoD), ONC, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), VA, and other institutions assisted in developing a roadmap to guide healthcare organizations toward improved interoperability through strategic health IT module procurement.
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Penn Medicine lossens the reins to speed data to doctors
Published October 15 2018, 5:00pm EDT
Penn Medicine increasingly wants its clinicians to use information in its electronic health records system to understand what care their patients need.
Called PennChart, the idea of its new initiative is to redesign the EHR to give clinicians automated real-time patient updates rather than sifting through the EHR, such as a notification when actions are required for specific treatment.
This could include referring a patient who had a heart attack to cardiac rehabilitation, or the prescribing of statins for patients who need to improve their management of cholesterol. It’s all about outcomes, says Ralph Muller, CEO of the University of Pennslyvania Heath System.
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Penn Medicine’s new transformation project looks to fill the ‘middle space’ between EHRs and clinicians
Oct 15, 2018 1:52pm
Impatient with the current progress of electronic health records (EHRs), one of the nation’s foremost academic medical centers is taking matters into its own hands.
Last week, Penn Medicine—which operates as the health system under the University of Pennsylvania—
launched a new initiative aimed at transforming EHRs into “more streamlined, interactive, smarter tools.”
That effort will focus primarily on what David Asch, M.D., the executive director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, calls “the middle space” between EHRs and clinical productivity.
“It’s about the creation of some middleware that takes the EHR products created by large companies and creates interfaces that are better,” he told FierceHealthcare. “It might ultimately be absorbed by those [EHR] companies, but I don’t think we can wait. I don’t think we should force clinicians to move to the EHR when we can be a part of the solution to help bring the EHR to them.”
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HIT Think Why OCR is varying its responses to breach events
Published October 15 2018, 5:04pm EDT
An interesting argument was posed in a recent
post about a lack of enforcement actions from the Office for Civil Rights against small or medium-sized healthcare entities that do not appropriately report breaches to either or the individuals impacted.
As outlined in the post, the apparent lack of follow up from OCR is occurring even though outside parties are filing reports or complaints with OCR about the underlying conduct that resulted in the breach.
The post then went on to report about a seemingly rare instance when OCR did follow up on a report. In the example, it was discovered that a covered entity left patient information exposed on an FTP server that could be publicly accessed. A security researcher found that information, notified the covered entity, was accused by the covered entity of hacking the covered entity, and then the researcher filed its report with OCR. In response, OCR contacted the covered entity and over six months later a breach report was finally filed by the covered entity. Further, the covered entity implemented many changes to its HIPAA policies and procedures to better bring itself into alignment with expectations.
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‘Virtual’ Doctor Visits Are Enticing Employers. What if You’re the Patient?
Employees choosing workplace health benefits for next year will probably not see a major change in their premiums. But they are likely to encounter more options for “virtual” doctor visits.
As the annual open enrollment season for health benefits gets underway, more large employers are offering services that let patients consult doctors who are in a separate location, using technology like secure video chats or remote monitoring. About three-quarters of large firms that offer health insurance now cover such “telemedicine,” a recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation found. That is up from 27 percent three years ago.
And half the large employers that were surveyed by the National Business Group on Health said adopting virtual solutions was their “top initiative” in 2019. The nearly 160 companies in the survey collectively employ about 13 million people.
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Carequality Seeks Health System Input to FHIR Governance Model
As FHIR adoption accelerates, the nonprofit organization hopes to create a framework for sustainable growth.
As the healthcare industry accelerates adoption of FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), which is already being widely used by healthcare organizations and vendors developing healthcare IT applications, the nonprofit organization
Carequality is seeking input to develop a governance model and unified standards. Involvement from health systems is welcomed.
"We're hoping to bring the healthcare community together and establish answers to the core policy and operational questions," says Dave Cassel, executive director of Carequality. "Ultimately, we're trying to achieve a single onramp to FHIR-based exchange, so that health systems and others can operate under the Carequality framework, whether they're exchanging with other providers, patients, or payers."
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Designing a New Electronic Health Record is One Tricky Business
Figuring out who should see which test results is a case in point
- by Fred N. Pelzman, MD October 12, 2018
As I may have mentioned before, our institution is at the start of a multi-year process of moving to a unified electronic health record (EHR).
Across our massive academic medical center, with different campuses and multiple practice locations, and a far-flung network of providers, we've all used different EHR systems through the years. It will be a tremendous advantage to the providers and our patients as we all get on the same page.
Of course, this unification does not come without some (a lot of) growing pains, and there have been countless meetings working to bring together the multiple players involved in such a venture. Clinicians and administrators have been coming together with programmers and system developers to hash out the details of how we need to rebuild the Tower of Babel and make us all speak the same language.
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Enjoy!
David.
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