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.
BlueKeep? Dridex? A state of emergency in Louisiana? Healthcare security pros find themselves living in interesting times. But with new threats emerging each day – and old ones, like phishing, not going away – some tried and true lessons are still useful.
In news that will surprise precisely no one, the list of lurking cyber threats putting healthcare data in peril continues to lengthen.
Pangea Connected’s system developer, Dr Arslan Usman, said IoT medical devices need to be better regulated, including making firmware and software updates “mandatory” for both developers and users, to boost cyber security efforts.
“The vulnerability allows a potential attacker with special technical skills and equipment to potentially send radio frequency signals to a nearby insulin pump to change settings, impacting insulin delivery,” according to a statement on the company’s website.
The review, published today, found the app reduced the average cost of admission for a patient with acute kidney injury (AKI) by 17%.
After implementing Streams, which provides clinicians with real time data relevant to AKI management, the average healthcare costs per patient were reduced by £2,123.
Streams has been in use at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust since early 2017. Shortly after rolling the app out, clinicians said it was saving them up to two hours a day.
Before the tool was implemented about 12% of AKI cases were missed, but that number has reduced to 3% with clinicians responding to urgent cases within 15 minutes or less, the peer review found.
After my last column I was contacted by a person in a UK company who work alongside the NHS. They have a new idea/product that they think could help GPs/NHS. They appear to have money from their main contract so getting off the ground isn’t their problem.
Their problem is who to sell to, where it fits, and I think it’s worth discussing as it fits with problems other companies I have spoken to have.
This company has an app, though I suspect the real IP is the algorithms. The app takes a history direct from the patient and tries to diagnose their musculoskeletal (MSK) problem and then offers advice and self-treatment.
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Robot MD: How artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize medical diagnosis
1 August, 2019
When it comes to medical ailments and their diagnosis, time is absolutely of the essence. The sooner we're aware of a developing condition, the better chance we have of treating and ultimately overcoming it. Lately we're seeing how artificial intelligence is poised to play a greater and greater role in detecting tell-tale signs of disease long before doctors can, with potentially life-saving ramifications.
In terms of machines outperforming humans that excel in certain fields, artificial intelligence has claimed some pretty big scalps of late. This includes toppling professional poker players at
Texas hold 'em , outperforming the world's best players of the
ancient Chinese game of Go and mastering the notoriously difficult game of
Ms. Pac-Man on Atari.
When we consider this rate of technological progression in the medical realm, things get even more exciting. The reason it holds so much potential in this area is because through machine learning and the power of computing, AI has the ability to look at medical imaging data and health records to spot subtle, yet crucial changes that human clinicians can't.
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DoD: Cerner EHR will meet military cybersecurity standards
Published August 02 2019, 1:17am EDT
Implementing a new electronic health record is never easy and always has some challenges. But, the undertaking is particularly complex for the Department of Defense because of its operational requirements.
Among DoD’s requirements for the Cerner EHR system is the ability to operate in austere environments and the need for robust cybersecurity, according to Navy Vice Admiral Raquel Bono, MD, director of the Defense Health Agency (DHA).
William Tinston, program executive officer for the Program Executive Office Defense Health Care Management Systems, notes that DoD and the Department of Veterans Affairs will share a single common EHR, and cybersecurity is an example of how the two agencies are cooperating and engaging in joint decision-making.
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NIST guidance aims to help providers secure IoT tools
Published August 02 2019, 4:58pm EDT
A new National Institute of Standards and Technology guide identifies cybersecurity features that should be included in network-capable Internet of Things devices.
The principles included in the NIST guidance are appropriate to any type of device that is linked to the Internet.
“This core baseline guide offers some recommendations for what an IoT device should do and what security features it should possess,” says Mike Fagan, a NIST computer scientist and one of the authors of the guide. “It is aimed at a technical audience, but we hope to help consumers as well as manufacturers and other entities.”
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Artificial Intelligence Could Improve Health Care for All — Unless it Doesn’t
AI-driven medical tools could democratize health care, but some worry they could also worsen inequalities.
“In the same way that technologies can close disparities, they can exacerbate disparities.”
There is no shortage of optimism about AI in the medical community. But many also caution the hype surrounding AI has yet to be realized in real clinical settings. There are also different visions for how AI services could make the biggest impact. And it’s still unclear whether AI will improve the lives of patients or just the bottom line for Silicon Valley companies, health care organizations, and insurers.
“I think that all our patients should actually want AI technologies to be brought to bear on weaknesses in the health care system, but we need to do it in a non-Silicon Valley hype way,” says Isaac Kohane, a biomedical informatics researcher at Harvard Medical School.
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Google’s DeepMind says its A.I. tech can spot acute kidney disease 48 hours before doctors spot it
Published Wed, Jul 31 2019 2:28 PM EDTUpdated Wed, Jul 31 2019 2:38 PM EDT
Key Points
DeepMind’s health unit just unveiled its biggest breakthrough in health care.
DeepMind is part of Alphabet and its health division is soon transitioning to Google Health under new leader David Feinberg.
The company has been working with the U.S. Department of Veterans to develop a way to predict acute kidney injuries before doctors can see them.
Five years after
Google acquired DeepMind, the health and artificial intelligence group is unveiling its biggest breakthrough yet in health care. Its technology is able to predict if a patient has potentially fatal kidney injuries 48 hours before many symptoms can be recognized by doctors.
In a
paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, DeepMind researchers said their algorithms correctly predicted 90 percent of acute kidney injuries that would end up requiring dialysis. The work was the result of a project with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to help doctors get a head start on treatment.
“We’ve been really excited for the potential of using AI to support clinicians moving care from reactive to proactive and preventative,” said Dominic King, DeepMind’s co-founder and clinical lead, in an interview.
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EMR ‘happy hour’ improves efficiency, efficacy
August 1, 2019
Hour-long monthly sessions where health care professionals shared best electronic medical record practices with their peers — dubbed by the session creators as “EMR Happy Hours” — often improved physician efficacy and efficiency in maintaining those records, according to a recent report in Annals of Family Medicine.
“The challenges of EMR training are twofold: (1) even the most easily adopted EMR innovations and features must be communicated effectively to existing users, and (2) time pressures result in an inertia with regard to workflows and habits of existing users,”
During EMR Happy Hour, health care professionals discuss how they reduced their documentation burden, then rearrange the EMR of the other participants. In one session, they created a Google document consisting of frequently used text expansion phrases so that the information could be copied, changed as needed and easily accessible, according to Day and Belden.
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32 million patient records were breached in the first half of 2019
That’s more than double the 15 million hacked in all of 2018.
More than 32 million patient records were breached between January and June 2019. That's more than double the 15 million medical records breached in all of 2018, says healthcare analytics firm
Protenus . According to the company, the number of disclosed incidents rose to 285 in the first half of the year, and the longstanding trend of at least one health data breach per day shows no signs of slowing down.
The Protenus'
2019 Mid-Year Breach Barometer Report found that 60 percent of all breaches were due to hacking, including the
single largest breach . In that incident, hackers targeted a medical collections agency and obtained the data of roughly 20 million patients, including those who'd used LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics. Their data was found for sale on the dark web.
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Babylon Health will achieve unicorn status thanks to Saudi-backed funding round
1 August, 2019
UK-based telehealth chatbot Babylon Health is in the process of securing a
$100 million to $500 million investment from Saudi Arabia's state-owned investment fund, which will lift Babylon into digital health's unicorn club, sources told the Financial Times.
Babylon's high-profile — at times
controversial — platform leverages an AI-powered chatbot to generate diagnoses based on user responses, and pairs patients with providers for telemedicine consultations when necessary. The Saudi investment is part of a larger forthcoming funding round — to be announced as soon as this week — that will tally hundreds of millions of dollars.
Babylon's latest cash influx will support the startup's international expansion plan, which it's pursued aggressively over the past year. The funding round should help Babylon establish its foothold in both Saudi Arabia and the US — two markets it's demonstrated interest in: For example, news surfaced in April that Babylon planned to
double its North American operations in preparation for US expansion.
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Patients need education, telehealth experience to boost its use
Published August 01 2019, 6:49pm EDT
Only about 10 percent of Americans have used telehealth services, and many of those who haven’t say they have limited access to it or are unaware of telehealth options.
Nearly 40 percent of respondents to a survey by market research firm J.D. Power say their health system does not offer the service or their health insurer won’t cover it.
Ironically, awareness in telehealth is lowest in rural areas despite long being seen as a natural fit to increase patient access to healthcare. Only 9 percent of rural residents have used the service, as Internet connectivity can still be limited in rural regions and providers need to work with their telecommunications firms to get better bandwidth.
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HIT Think NLP, deep learning and the problems of explainability and bias in AI
Published August 01 2019, 6:10pm EDT
If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person, you may view artificial intelligence and natural language processing as a way to replace the need for valuable resources to spend precious time doing a lot of rote work.
These technologies can provide you with a level of intelligent process automation for mundane tasks, allowing you to focus on more important things, and make your life better as a result.
Unfortunately, there have been a few problems with executing on that value proposition. Many view (and have experienced) AI that is so complex, and natural language processing capabilities that are so cutting edge, that non-technical people will never be able to understand them.
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Inquiry ordered on suspicion judge's health records compromised
Maribor, 1 August - UKC Maribor, Slovenia's second largest hospital, will have to conduct an internal inquiry on suspicion of mass unauthorised access to the health records of a Maribor judge who was recently brutally assaulted.
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Facebook is funding brain experiments to create a device that reads your mind
Big tech firms are trying to read people’s thoughts, and no one’s ready for the consequences.
Jul 30, 2019
In 2017, Facebook announced that it wanted to create a headband that would let people type at a speed of 100 words per minute, just by thinking.
Now, a little over two years later, the social-media giant is revealing that it has been financing extensive university research on human volunteers.
Today, some of that research was described in a scientific paper from the University of California, San Francisco, where researchers have been developing “speech decoders” able to determine what people are trying to say by analyzing their brain signals.
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Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM renew pledge to support health data interoperability
Jul 30, 2019 3:14pm
Last August, six of the world's largest technology giants
publicly committed to supporting interoperability in healthcare and to take steps to advance data-sharing standards.
A year later, the cloud technology leaders say they have made notable progress toward reducing barriers to interoperability including the release of open-source software and the development of new standards.
The six companies and competitors—Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce—announced a renewed commitment to interoperability at the
CMS Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference on Tuesday afternoon.
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CMS pilot taps FHIR to give clinicians access to claims data
Published July 31 2019, 12:27am EDT
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is launching a pilot program that leverages HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard to enable clinicians to access claims data directly within their workflow.
At Tuesday’s White House Blue Button Developers Conference, CMS announced the Data at the Point of Care pilot, part of the Trump administration’s 2018 MyHealthEData initiative designed to put patients in control of their own healthcare information so they can make informed medical decisions.
Last year, CMS launched the first FHIR-based claims application programming interface (API)—called Blue Button 2.0—for Medicare beneficiaries to connect their data to apps and other tools. Now, the agency’s new Data at the Point of Care pilot is intended to help better connect clinicians to their patients’ healthcare information via the FHIR API.
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Telehealth Companies Team Up to Deliver Remote Patient Monitoring To Go
Henry Schein and Medpod are joining forces with Uber Health to create a program whereby care providers can arrange to have a telehealth kit delivered to a remote patient - or have the patient driven to a clinic with the kit.
July 31, 2019 - Three telehealth vendors have teamed up to give hospitals and health systems a new way to conduct diagnostic exams on remote patients.
Henry Schein Medical has announced a new program through which Medpod’s MobileDoc 2 telemedicine suitcase can be dispatched by care providers to a patient at home, school, work or other remote location through Uber Health, which can either transport the digital health kit to the patient or transport the patient to a clinic containing the kit.
“Our new partnership with Uber Health, and launch of Medpod MobileDoc 2, will help break down barriers that had previously required diagnostic exams to take place in traditional care settings,” Jack Tawil, Medpod’s chairman and Chief Executive Officer,
said in a press release . “With the MobileDoc 2’s ability to take the physician office environment into patients’ homes and other non-traditional settings, we can create new convenient care delivery options and access points for patients.”
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Neuroscientists decode brain speech signals into written text
Study funded by Facebook aims to improve communication with paralysed patients
Wed 31 Jul 2019 01.21 AEST Last modified on Wed 31 Jul 2019 06.10 AEST
Doctors have turned the brain signals for speech into written sentences in a research project that aims to transform how patients with severe disabilities communicate in the future.
The breakthrough is the first to demonstrate how the intention to say specific words can be extracted from brain activity and converted into text rapidly enough to keep pace with natural conversation.
In its current form, the brain-reading software works only for certain sentences it has been trained on, but scientists believe it is a stepping stone towards a more powerful system that can decode in real time the words a person intends to say.
Doctors at the University of California in San Francisco took on the challenge in the hope of creating a product that allows paralysed people to communicate more fluidly than using existing devices that pick up eye movements and muscle twitches to control a virtual keyboard.
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Older adults want telehealth, and MA is poised to expand its use
Published July 31 2019, 3:32pm EDT
Some 52 percent of Americans older than 65—an estimated 25 million people—are willing to use telehealth, according to a new study by American Well.
“This insight presents a tremendous opportunity for health plans interested in engaging Medicare Advantage members in telehealth—but first they need to understand what is driving senior willingness to use telehealth, what is preventing it and what they should do to promote telehealth adoption among this population,” authors of the study say.
American Well, which powers telehealth solutions for more than 160 health systems and their 55 health plan partners, polled 2,000 adults online to measure their usage and sentiments toward telehealth. Of those surveyed, 20 percent were seniors older than 65.
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Could sensor technology address CCTV privacy concerns in care homes?
Health tech startup says AI solution could offer peace of mind to families of elderly people.
July 31, 2019 03:21 PM
Health secretary Matt Hancock recently gave backing to a newspaper campaign calling for CCTV to be made compulsory in elderly care homes.
But privacy concerns have been raised by regulator the Care Quality Commission (CQC) around using surveillance in a residential setting.
“Where and when such technology is being used, consideration must be given to important matters such as individual rights to privacy and dignity,” said Kate Terroni, chief inspector of adult social care at the CQC.
Sensor technology combined with artificial intelligence (AI) has been suggested as one solution that could flag up health issues, while not invading residents’ privacy.
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VA transfers 23.5M veteran health records to Cerner data center
Published July 30 2019, 12:22am EDT
The Department of Veterans Affairs has completed the initial data migration for its Electronic Health Record Modernization by transferring the records of 23.5 million veterans to a Cerner data center.
Both the VA and the Department of Defense will share the data center hosted at Cerner’s Kansas City headquarters as the two agencies look to implement a common Cerner Millennium EHR system.
According to the VA, the 23.5 million veteran health records that were recently transferred to the shared data center with DoD will be processed this summer.
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HIT Think How digital health tools can help transform healthcare
Published July 30 2019, 6:23pm EDT
A coming wave of digital health tools has the potential to transform how and where healthcare is provided.
Using information from a patient’s medical record—including lab results, provider notes and images, such as CT scans—along with genomic data, prior insurance claims and environmental information, machine learning algorithms can substantially improve diagnostic testing. They can also support decision-making tools for providers to improve guideline adherence.
The tools’ success is not a given, however. They must first gain the trust of patients, providers and payers. In addition, the tools must not prompt alert fatigue. If providers are flooded with warnings and advice, they may become desensitized and tune out the information.
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DHS Alerts to Remote Vulnerabilities in Multiple VPN Applications
According to a recent alert from Homeland Security, a remote attacker could exploit vulnerabilities found in three VPN applications to take control of an affected system.
July 30, 2019 - Vulnerabilities found in Palo Alto Networks, FortiGuard, and Pulse Secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications could allow a remote attack to take control of the affected systems, according to a recent
alert from the Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
For Palo Alto, the VPN vulnerability is found in the GlobalProtect portal and GlobalProtect Gateway interface products. The company is aware of the flaw, which was addressed in prior maintenance releases. Without the patch, successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an unauthenticated user to remotely execute arbitrary code.
The vulnerability is found in older models, and the latest platform, PAN-OS 9.0 is not affected.
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Would You Want a Computer to Judge Your Risk of H.I.V. Infection?
A new software algorithm decides which patients are most likely to become infected with the virus. But this is not like other risk calculators, some experts say.
A few years ago, researchers at Harvard and Kaiser Permanente Northern California had an inspired idea: Perhaps they could use the wealth of personal data in electronic health records to identify patients at high risk of getting infected with H.I.V.
Doctors could use an algorithm to pinpoint these patients and then steer them to a daily pill to prevent infection, a strategy known as PrEP.
But the researchers know they must tread delicately in using the software they developed. It’s one thing to have a computer find a patient who is at risk for breast cancer. But to have software that suggests a patient is a person who too frequently has unsafe sex and risks H.I.V. infection — how should doctors use such a tool?
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DirectTrust alliance developing standard for trusted healthcare instant messaging
The goal of the Trusted Instant Messaging+ standard is to enable secure real-time electronic transmission of healthcare information.
July 30, 2019 11:12 AM
DirectTrust, a non-profit, vendor-neutral alliance initially created by and for participants in the Direct communications standard, has announced the development of Trusted Instant Messaging+, or TIM+,, an industry-first standard to enable real-time communication of health information that incorporates trust network concepts to ensure secure transmissions between known, trusted entities within and across enterprises.
WHY IT MATTERS
DirectTrust is a healthcare industry alliance created to advance the electronic sharing of protected health information between provider organizations, and between providers and patients, for the purpose of improved transitions of care, care efficiency and coordination, patient satisfaction, and reducing healthcare cost.
While unsecured messaging may occur via text message, iMessage, products like Slack and others, there currently is no standard for secure instant messaging in healthcare, especially between disparate systems. Furthermore, use of unsecured messaging poses risk that HIPAA and other privacy regulations may be violated.
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Seema Verma, Jared Kushner tout new physician-focused MyHealthEData project
The Blue Button API pilot, Data at the Point of Care, aims to connect clinicians with claims data, giving them deeper insights into their patients' care history.
July 30, 2019 02:26 PM
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has launched a new pilot program to give healthcare providers easier access to claims data, helping fill in gaps in information – previous diagnoses, past procedures, medication lists – and enabling a more complete patient history.
WHY IT MATTERS
The DPC initiative uses the Blue Button 2.0 API, which Verma said by now has enabled "nearly 40 million Medicare beneficiaries to connect their claims data with applications that help them manage their health."
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Is The Healthcare Industry Anywhere Near Ditching the Password?
July 30, 2019
A new
report from a security firm Duo Labs suggests that standard authentication practices may be shifting beyond the password, though it didn’t take a stab at predicting which industries may move most quickly in that direction.
To conduct its research, Duo analyzed data from nearly 24 million devices from across its customer base, including more than 1 million applications and services and roughly half a billion authentications per month.
As part of the research, Duo looked at the authentication methods its customers in several industries used. It found that where healthcare is concerned, 60% of providers use the vendor’s own Duo Push, 20.9% use phone call-based methods, 12.7% use mobile passcodes, 4.0% SMS passcodes and, 1.7% hardware tokens.
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Digitalising NHS patient data could be the key to a healthcare revolution
NHS ‘big data’ could be worth nearly £10 billion per year, estimates EY report.
July 29, 2019 10:53 AM
A recent EY report presents a framework for the efficient and ethical use of NHS data, which it describes as ‘a treasure trove of information detailing health, wellness, illness and the associated care pathways.’
A recent Ernst & Young (EY) report presents a framework for the efficient and ethical use of NHS data, which it describes as ‘a treasure trove of information detailing health, wellness, illness and the associated care pathways.’
According to their estimates, genomic data currently held by the NHS could generate £5 billion each year and provide healthcare benefits worth £4.6 billion to patients.
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July 26, 2019 04:12 PM
Digital health companies see new 'exit' strategy with IPOs
Livongo and Health Catalyst began trading on the Nasdaq on Thursday, joining a slew of companies to end a nearly three-year drought since the last initial public offering of a digital health company.
The two companies joined Phreesia, a healthcare software provider that went public one week earlier on July 18, and Change Healthcare, a revenue cycle management company formed through a series of acquisitions and a merger with McKesson's technology business, which began trading in June.
The digital health companies going public this year don't feel like startups. They are established companies led by seasoned executives, said Pam Arlotto, president and CEO of healthcare consultancy Maestro Strategies.
Data warehousing and analytics company Health Catalyst was founded more than a decade ago, while Livongo, a company that tackles chronic diseases, was founded by former Allscripts Healthcare Solutions CEO Glen Tullman and is led by a team of health technology heavyweights, including former Cerner Corp. President Zane Burke. Phreesia, a provider of patient intake software, launched in 2005.
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Doctor Alexa Will See You Now: Is Amazon Primed To Come To Your Rescue?
Now that it’s upending the way you play music, cook, shop, hear the news and check the weather, the friendly voice emanating from your Amazon Alexa-enabled smart speaker is poised to wriggle its way into all things health care.
Amazon has big ambitions for its devices. It thinks Alexa, the virtual assistant inside them, could help doctors diagnose mental illness, autism, concussions and Parkinson’s disease. It even hopes Alexa will detect when you’re having a heart attack.
At present, Alexa can perform a handful of health care-related tasks: “She” can track blood glucose levels, describe symptoms, access post-surgical care instructions, monitor home prescription deliveries and make same-day appointments at the nearest urgent care center.
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Do fitness trackers have an impact on eating disorders?
Is there a link between health-focused tech and disordered eating?
Content warning: There are details and personal anecdotes about eating disorders in this article.
Tracking workouts, steps and calories with wearable devices and apps has become the new normal. Take a look around next time you’re at the gym or go for a jog around the park – most people working out have a wearable strapped to their wrist or a phone strapped to their arm.
The number of connected wearable devices worldwide will push 74 million this year and is expected to rise to more than 1 billion by 2022 – health-focused wearables will make up a large part of that number.
Even devices that aren’t marketed solely for their health-focused features, like the Apple Watch, tend to have step counting, calorie burn and exercise tracking built-in as a standard. This means even if you haven’t bought a wearable or smartwatch to track your activity, data about your body is often only a few swipes away.
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Apple contractors 'regularly hear confidential details' on Siri recordings
Workers hear drug deals, medical details and people having sex, says whistleblower
Sat 27 Jul 2019 02.34 AEST Last modified on Sat 27 Jul 2019 03.45 AEST
Workers heard the information when or providing quality control for Apple’s Siri voice assistant. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or “grading”, the company’s Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned.
Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. They are tasked with grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri’s response was appropriate.
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VUMC pilot to use voice commands to retrieve EHR data
Published July 29 2019, 12:15am EDT
What if clinicians could use voice commands to retrieve information from electronic health records in the same effortless way that consumers use virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri?
It’s a future vision for medicine in which natural language recognition systems could revolutionize how physicians interact with EHRs by making the platforms as responsive as voice-controlled virtual assistants in the commercial market.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center will take a major step next month to make this vision a reality with the launch of a pilot to demonstrate a prototype of such a system, which leverages Nuance’s AI-based Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant technology integrated with VUMC’s Epic EHR.
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HIT Think Why cloud-based records raise de-identification questions
Published July 29 2019, 5:32pm EDT
Questions around the state of privacy for healthcare and other information are being left unanswered in many regards. Many services and tools fall outside the “traditional” healthcare realm, which means HIPAA and state-level legal protections focused on the healthcare industry do not provide coverage.
Services that ostensibly protected data are also frequently found to have either not been entirely forthcoming or always using data just without readily apparent disclosure.
The summary of privacy woes may seem like a litany applicable only to individual or consumer use. Unfortunately, the same may hold true for healthcare clinicians as well. Digital or cloud-based tools can offer a seemingly great deal, but that great deal may come with a catch: the ability to de-identify data and use it for other purposes.
While that can be a negotiated point when working with a vendor or consultant, a knowing negotiation is not problematic. What happens though when the ability to use data is inserted after use has already started or is part of the terms of use when signing up for an electronic medical record?
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More Evidence That Healthcare Cybersecurity Could Stand To Be Tightened Up Quite A Bit
July 26, 2019
Not long ago, I shared the
results of a survey concluding that healthcare organizations generally felt pretty confident about the state of their cybersecurity defenses, despite having had WannaCry wipe the floor with them just two years before.
Now, another survey has come out which underscores just how misplaced that confidence might be. The survey, which was conducted by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, found that most responding organizations had only basic user authentication methods in place to protect health data.
The research team, which also included the Information Security Media Group, found that 58% of 100 responding healthcare organizations believed that the cybersecurity measures protecting their patient portal were above average or superior when compared to other patient portals. As it turns out, though, they were probably wrong.
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MU Study Suggests That A Health IT Divide May Be Emerging Among Physicians
July 29, 2019
In retrospect, we probably should have predicted that once Meaningful Use was put into place, some physicians would be better situated than others to take advantage of the program. Now, research has emerged to suggest that not only did MU create HIT winners and losers, it might also have helped to foster long-term differences between physicians who jumped in and those that didn’t.
The recently published research article, which focused on MU attestation, suggests that technology gaps may be opening between independent and health system-integrated physicians. It also concludes that MU may have created pressure on independent physicians to join integrated organizations.
The
study , which appears in the journal
Health Services Research , compared rates of MU attestation and attrition from the MU program among three groups: independent, horizontally integrated and vertically integrated physicians.
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The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking
July 23, 2019
Like many medications, the wakefulness drug modafinil, which is marketed under the trade name Provigil, comes with a small, tightly folded paper pamphlet. For the most part, its contents—lists of instructions and precautions, a diagram of the drug’s molecular structure—make for anodyne reading. The subsection called “Mechanism of Action,” however,
contains a sentence that might induce sleeplessness by itself: “The mechanism(s) through which modafinil promotes wakefulness is unknown.”
Provigil isn’t uniquely mysterious. Many drugs receive regulatory approval, and are widely prescribed, even though no one knows exactly how they work. This mystery is built into the process of drug discovery, which often proceeds by trial and error. Each year, any number of new substances are tested in cultured cells or animals; the best and safest of those are tried out in people. In some cases, the success of a drug promptly inspires new research that ends up explaining how it works—but not always. Aspirin was discovered in 1897, and yet no one convincingly explained how it worked
until 1995 . The same phenomenon exists elsewhere in medicine.
Deep-brain stimulation involves the implantation of electrodes in the brains of people who suffer from specific movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease; it’s been in widespread use for more than twenty years, and some think it should be employed for other purposes, including general cognitive enhancement. No one can say how it works.
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Weekly News Recap
Shares of Health Catalyst, Livongo, and Phreesia begin trading with significant first-day price jumps.
Cerner announces plans to create a “monetized distribution model” of selling patient data to drug companies and insurers.
Tenet announces that it will spin off its Conifer revenue cycle management and population health business into a publicly traded company and that Conifer CEO Stephen Mooney has resigned.
Cerner’s Q2 earnings meet Wall Street expectations as revenue fell short.
Essence, parent company of Lumeris, faces CMS review for using Lumeris software to identify patients who could be billed as “enhanced encounters.”
AHIMA and CHIME urge the Senate to pass a House bill that would allow HHS to participate in the rollout of a national patient identifier.
Amazon threatens to sue Surescripts over the potential loss of access to patient prescription data for its PillPack mail order pharmacy subsidiary.
Tennessee creates a committee to study state EHR use for efficiency and potential fraud.
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Enjoy!
David.
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