Here are a few I came across last week.
Note: Each link is followed by a title and few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
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NIH Grant Supports Creation of Non-Biased Machine-Learning Algorithm
Following the reception of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Dascena will work to create an unbiased algorithm to help diagnose and treat acute coronary syndrome.
March 10, 2022 - The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities has extended a grant to Dascena to support the development of a non-biased machine-learning algorithm that can enhance treatment for acute coronary syndrome.
Dascena is an organization that develops machine-learning algorithms to help improve patient outcomes.
According to the American Heart Association, ACS is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the US, and about 805,000 Americans suffer from ACS annually. But, research has shown that ACS treatment and diagnosis are targeted to White men, leading to a lack of evidence in how to assist other populations.
With the new grant, Dascena plans to develop an unbiased prediction tool for diagnosing and treating ACS. The prediction tool will utilize EHR data to create the impartial algorithm.
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https://patientengagementhit.com/news/ncqa-launches-website-offering-insight-into-health-equity
NCQA Launches Website Offering Insight into Health Equity
The launch of the Health Equity Resource Center aims to provide healthcare organizations with best practices for reducing health disparities and improving health equity.
March 11, 2022 - The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has officially launched the Health Equity Resource Center, a public website intending to enable better health equity practices among healthcare organizations.
By providing access to NCQA research and white papers, the Health Equity Resource Center will offer readers insight into the implications of health inequities and best practices to improve health disparities impacting patients.
The website will also include detailed information regarding health plans, health systems, government, and employers, to assist organizations in making quality improvements that advance health equity, NCQA stated.
“The Health Equity Resource Center is another step in the journey NCQA started a decade ago to help organizations measure and deliver equitable, high-quality care,” NCQA President Margaret E. O’Kane said in a press release. “These tools enable organizations to assess and improve the care they provide so that quality care can become the norm for everyone in America.”
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https://www.digitalhealth.net/2022/03/sajid-javid-nhs-reform-speech/
Sajid Javid to unveil his new vision for NHS reform
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is due to announce a new vision for NHS reform, including an increased role for the NHS App and electronic patient record (EPR) targets.
Jordan Sollof 8 March, 2022
Building on the Health and Care Bill that was formally introduced to parliament in July last year, Sajid Javid is expected to lay out plans which put patient choice and expansion of personalised care at the front and centre.
From April the Health and Social Care Levy will come into action, raising almost £36billion over the next three years for health and social care services, which the government ensures will be used as efficiently as possible as adult social care is reformed and the Covid backlog is tackled.
The next steps for reform are expected to include new policies to modernise the NHS, benefit patients and build on lessons learned during the pandemic focused on avoiding ill-health, enhancing performance and increasing patient choice.
Javid is expected to say: “Those are the long-term challenges the NHS must adapt to: changing demographics and disease; changing technology and expectations; and unsustainable finances.
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HHS working with health systems to launch single patient login for health portals
- Wednesday, March 9th, 2022
HHS is working with healthcare organizations to roll out a single login for patients to access their medical records across multiple systems, Politico reported March 8.
The department is working with 20 healthcare organizations, including CVS Health, Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente and Renton, Wash.-based Providence.
Before March ends, the effort will launch a test environment for integrating the technology, Ryan Howells, principal at Leavitt Partners and program manager at the CARIN Alliance, which is leading the effort, told Politico.
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Former CDC directors: Coordinating our nation's health data will save lives
By Tom Frieden, Julie Gerberding, Jeffrey Koplan, William L Roper and David Satcher, opinion contributors — 03/10/22 08:31 AM EST 42
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill
As the SARS-CoV-2 surge recedes, we need to apply the lessons we’ve learned during this pandemic to improve our response to the next health emergency. One major obstacle has been the lack of health data needed to track the pandemic and assess its impact across the complex U.S. healthcare and public health ecosystem. This lack of timely, standardized data hampered our ability to respond rapidly and effectively to the pandemic.
For too long, we have neglected our nation’s public health data infrastructure, much of which is aging, obsolete and insufficient to meet our needs. We need to modernize our entire approach to data, from its collection and reporting to stewardship and management, to how we share it among public health agencies and health systems so that we have the information we need to protect health and save lives.
During our tenure as Centers of Disease Control and Prevention directors over a quarter of a century, each of us recognized the need for more accurate, timely and comprehensive data and each of us made progress toward that goal. But progress was limited because of both lack of funds and lack of legal authority.
As Congress considers the Prepare for and Respond to Existing Viruses, Emerging New Threats, and Pandemics Act (PREVENT Pandemics Act) we urge lawmakers to include specific authorities needed to standardize and coordinate public health data across jurisdictions. This is critical to managing health threats in local communities as well as to provide local, state and federal policymakers with timely, accurate information to inform guidance and policy decisions to protect Americans.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/biden-has-big-plans-mental-health-will-they-work
Biden has big plans for mental health, but will they work?
President Joe Biden's strategy to address the country's psychological crisis relies on telehealth as a key component – but that may not be enough to bridge the provider gap.
By Kat Jercich
March 11, 2022 03:22 PM
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden announced a strategy to address the country's mental health crisis, which has reached staggering levels amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
The multi-pronged plan proposed several approaches, including strengthening system capacity, connecting Americans to care and creating healthy environments for the population.
Telehealth also plays a major role in the path forward, with the president noting the safety and efficacy of virtual care in behavioral services.
"To maintain continuity of access, the administration will work with Congress to ensure coverage of tele-behavioral health across health plans, and support appropriate delivery of telemedicine across state lines," said the president's office in a fact sheet.
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Home-Based Remote Patient Monitoring Yields Highly Accurate BP Readings
A new study shows that home-based blood pressure measurement is highly reliable with a mean difference of -0.1 mmHg compared with ambulatory monitoring.
March 10, 2022 - Home-based blood pressure (BP) measurements were more reliable and accurate than those taken in clinics or kiosks, a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found.
The study included 510 participants between 18 and 85 years old from 12 Washington State-based primary care centers. These participants were divided equally into one of three groups: clinic, home, or kiosk-based methods of BP measurement.
The clinic group had their BP measured during follow-up care, while the home group had their BP measured twice a day for five days, and the kiosk group three times a day for three days. All participants also completed 24-hour ambulatory monitoring (ABPM) at three weeks follow-up.
Researchers defined the study's primary objective as examining the potential difference between ABPM systolic BP results and those of the three groups.
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Healthcare Practices Cyber Incident Response Less Than Most Sectors
Research revealed that healthcare and other critical infrastructure sectors conducted cyber incident response exercises far less often than other industries.
By Jill McKeon
March 10, 2022 - Although cyberattacks and data breaches have bombarded the healthcare sector in recent years, recent research from Immersive Labs found that healthcare conducts cyber incident response exercises far less than other industries.
Immersive Labs analyzed 35,000 members of the cybersecurity workforce from a variety of industries and found that the healthcare sector conducted only two cyber crisis exercises per year on average. The technology and financial services sectors conducted nine and seven crisis exercises per year on average, respectively.
It makes sense that highly targeted industries like technology and finance would prepare accordingly. But healthcare is an equally high-profile and highly regulated cyberattack target, making the lack of crisis response exercises troubling.
“The modern cyber crisis is an all-encompassing organizational trauma. Stopping incidents bringing operations to a halt and destroying reputation, corporate value and stakeholder relationships requires a holistic response from the entire workforce,” the report stated.
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CIOs step into new roles to assess a slew of digital tech
With thousands of startups emerging, UC Davis hopes its CoLab will better enable information sharing and research on new solutions.
Mar 10 2022
Editor-in-Chief, HDM
Chief information officers are increasingly taking on new responsibilities for wading through myriad digital health solutions to achieve a patient-friendly, clinician-helpful digital strategy.
Ashish Atreja, MD, CIO and digital health officer for UC Davis Health:
Now, with digital health, the conversation has gone from ‘Why?’ to ‘How fast can you get it?’
It’s no easy task, notes Ashish Atreja, MD, CIO and digital health officer for UC Davis Health. Rapid development, jump-started by the pandemic and the rush to empower patients, has produced an alarming array of solutions from which to choose.
Speaking at a CIO and CDO Summit at the VIVE event in Miami Beach, Atreja noted there are an estimated 5,000 digital health startups for CIOs to assess, with senior leadership now pressuring IT executives to carve out a digital approach to care.
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https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=65bf7485-6e36-4e3b-904b-461be5d7bf58
Enter the Metaverse: a buzzword-busting primer
Gilbert + Tobin Lesley Sutton, Simon Burns, Michael Caplan, Melissa Fai, Tim Gole, Andrew Hii and Sheila McGregor
Australia March 8 2022
In the past 6 months the term ‘metaverse’ has catapulted from relative obscurity to the very top of the zeitgeist. Despite this recent spike in interest, work on ‘the metaverse’ has been underway for years. Its future will now be shaped by a wide range of industry players and potentially regulators and legislators.
What is the metaverse?
The term “metaverse” still has a somewhat contested definition. As a concept, the metaverse has been positioned as the next step-change for the internet, part of the broader shift between web 2.0 to web 3.0.
Practically, the metaverse has been described as a network of shared, three-dimensional interoperable virtual spaces accessed over the internet in real time by effectively an unlimited number of users. But virtual spaces have existed since the likes of There and Second Life, along with a wealth of other online role-playing games and virtual experiences released since. So, what differentiates these from the “metaverse” we hear about today?
- User immersion and interactivity are hallmarks of a fully-fledged metaverse. Experiencing virtual spaces through a desktop or mobile interface is one thing, but accessing them through immersive augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) or mixed reality (MR) technology better embodies the metaverse of today.
- An expanding scope is key to how we need to be thinking about the metaverse. Virtual worlds have had a social, gaming, entertainment and educational use case for decades. While the metaverse will undoubtedly enhance experiences in these sectors, the commercial world is now being brought into the virtual fold. The application of metaverse technology for the workplace is already live and is expected to be pivotal to mainstreaming the technology. We are increasingly seeing ecommerce, telehealth and real estate (among other sectors) enter the metaverse.
- Finally, what some commentators describe as the “full-fat” metaverse of tomorrow is poised to attract a level of mass-market uptake and social ubiquity. Metaverse-experiences available today are decidedly niche in terms of market penetration. But just as a majority of the global population now access the World Wide Web as part of normal life, some see a fully-realised metaverse attracting similar popularisation over time.
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NIH-funded study offers recommendations for measuring gender, sexual orientation
A committee from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine examined current practices for data collection regarding LGBTQ communities and issued guiding principles for the future.
By Kat Jercich
March 10, 2022 02:22 PM
A consensus study report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued guiding principles for data collection efforts regarding sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
The report – which was produced at the request of the National Institutes of Health and supported by contracts between NIH and the National Academy of Sciences – examined the ways in which this information is currently collected and made recommendations for future measurements that fully reflect community experiences.
"Sex, gender, and sexual orientation are core aspects of identity that shape opportunities, experiences with discrimination, and outcomes through the life course; therefore, it is crucial that measures of these concepts accurately capture their complexity," said report authors.
WHY IT MATTERS
As the authors of the report noted, better measurements of LGBTQ populations will help to better understand the health challenges they face.
"LGBTQI+ people continue to experience disparate and inequitable treatment, including harassment, discrimination and violence, which in turn affects outcomes in many areas of everyday life, including health and access to healthcare services, economic and educational attainment, and family and social support," read the report.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/top-10-most-popular-hospital-inpatient-ehr-systems-in-us
Top 10 Most Popular Hospital Inpatient EHR Systems in US
Enterprise EHR systems such as Epic and Cerner dominate the inpatient industry, but specialty vendors hold their own, especially among CAHs.
March 09, 2022 - The wide range of hospitals and clinics across the care continuum investing in EHR technology has fostered a healthy amount of diversity in the inpatient EHR system market.
Enterprise EHR vendors such as Epic and Cerner continue to dominate the industry year over year, but small and specialty vendors can still hold their own.
The gradual increase in EHR adoption among critical access hospitals (CAHs) and specialty care facilities, including behavioral and mental health, have carved out a niche for health IT companies willing to focus on the unique needs of particular organizations.
Larger hospitals are more likely to implement advanced EHR systems like those offered by Epic and Cerner, but 80 percent of CAHs and rural hospitals reported using at least a basic EHR system.
The following are the top 10 inpatient EHR systems based on data from Definitive Healthcare:
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https://mhealthintelligence.com/news/patient-comfort-with-virtual-mental-healthcare-is-high
Patient Comfort With Virtual Mental Healthcare is High
Healthcare consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with receiving mental health services virtually, and plan sponsors — both payers and human resources directors — are paying attention.
By Anuja Vaidya
March 09, 2022 - A majority of healthcare consumers across all age groups are as or more comfortable with app-based virtual therapy than in-person services, according to a new report.
For the report, Evernorth, Cigna's health services portfolio, partnered with Ipsos to conduct a nationwide survey of more than 3,000 healthcare consumers with employer-sponsored health insurance, 575 human resources leaders, and 58 health plan leaders. The survey was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual behavioral healthcare shot up. About 17 percent of respondents said they used virtual mental health services in 2021, compared with 11 percent in 2020.
"As the importance of behavioral health is increasingly recognized, few dispute its strong connection to overall health, both in the medical community and the general public," wrote Urvashi Patel, PhD, managing director, Evernorth Research Institute, in an online post. "It remains top of mind and a top concern."
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https://mhealthintelligence.com/news/national-telehealth-use-skyrocketed-amid-omicron-surge
National Telehealth Use Skyrocketed Amid Omicron Surge
In December, national telehealth use rose by 11.4 percent, increasing its prevalence in all medical claim lines by 0.5 percent, new data shows.
March 09, 2022 - Telehealth utilization increased nationally by 11.4 percent between November and December 2021 and rose from 4.4 to 4.9 percent of all medical claim lines, according to FAIR Health’s Monthly Telehealth Regional Tracker.
The tracker is a complimentary service that researches and analyzes how telehealth usage changes month to month, tracking various statistics such as claim lines, procedure codes, and diagnostic categories. The service began in May 2020 and reports data on the US as a whole and four separate US regions.
Primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth utilization has experienced an upward trend in the last several years. Though there were some dips in use in the second half of 2021, the tracker reported a significant increase in telehealth utilization between November and December. Researchers believe this increase relates to the first detection of the Omicron variant, which took place around this time.
The 11.4 percent increase is a large margin compared to previous months. Though December was the second month in a row that national telehealth use grew, the November tracker revealed only a 7.3 percent increase.
HSCC Focuses On Medical Device Security in New Contract Language Template
HSCC released a contract language template for healthcare organizations to use to ensure medical device security when working with device manufacturers.
By Jill McKeon
March 09, 2022 - The Healthcare & Public Health Sector Coordinating Councils (HSCC) published model contract language to help healthcare organizations ensure medical device security when crafting contracts with device manufacturers.
Mayo Clinic, Premier Inc., and Siemens Healthineers led the drafting process intending to deliver a template to help healthcare organizations and medical technology companies navigate and create cybersecurity contractual terms and conditions.
The need for a contract template stemmed from ongoing complications between healthcare organizations and medical device manufacturers (MDMs) regarding responsibility, accountability, and varying cybersecurity expectations.
“These factors have introduced and sustained ambiguities in cybersecurity and accountability between MDM’s and [healthcare organizations] that historically have been reconciled at best inconsistently in the purchase contract negotiation process, leading to downstream disputes and potential patient safety implications,” an accompanying press release explained.
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https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/969880
When Disclosing Sensitive Info, Patients Prefer App vs Staff: Study
Aine Cryts
March 08, 2022
Patients using a tablet-based app were more than twice as likely to disclose depression, intimate partner violence, and fall risk compared with verbal screenings, according to a new study.
The study, published online today in JAMA Network Open, includes the use of mPath, a tablet-based app created by a team of researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine.
Researchers studied the use of the app at six primary care practices among patients age 18 years or older. The app, which exists on a tablet that's given to patients at check-in, includes screening questions for depression, intimate partner violence, and fall risk that would otherwise be asked verbally by nurses. The results of the questionnaires are transmitted to a practice's EHR.
"We were surprised to find that the app detected so many more people with depression or safety concerns compared to when nursing staff were asking the same questions verbally," lead author David Miller Jr, MD, a professor of internal medicine and public health sciences at Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told Medscape Medical News. "To put [the study results] in context, for every 10 patients who walked in the door, our app found one additional person with concerns that would have been missed."
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https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2022/03/09/himss-2022-announcements-and-solutions/
HIMSS 2022 Announcements and Solutions
March 9, 2022
Next week is the HIMSS 2022 conference happening in Orlando, FL. We’ll be covering the event here at Healthcare IT Today and sharing all the interesting insights and perspectives we find. Plus, you can expect some great Healthcare IT Today interviews from the conference as well.
Healthcare IT Today will be setup at HIMSS this year at booth #4983. Feel free to drop by watch our live interview recordings, say hello, or have a quick chat. We would love to see you! See our full lineup of HIMSS22 interviews and events here.
With so many companies at the event, we wanted to collect a kind of cliff notes version of some of the important announcements and solutions companies are making and offering at the event. Hopefully, this will give people a feel for what’s being shared at the event along with discovering some new products and solutions they may not have heard about previously.
We’ll keep adding to the list as we hear of new news and announcements from companies that are of interest to the Healthcare IT Today Community. Bookmark this page and come back to see what’s new throughout the next week.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/health-information-exchanges-may-grow-digital-divide-in-referrals
Health Information Exchanges May Grow Digital Divide in Referrals
Health information exchanges can create a digital divide in the referral market as participating physicians benefit from the increased patient referrals at the expense of non-participating physicians.
March 08, 2022 - By participating in health information exchanges (HIEs), physicians can increase their rate of referrals from and to other members by 44 percent to 46 percent. However, researchers suggest these benefits can grow the digital divide as they are at the expense of non-participating physicians.
More than a third of all patients are referred to a specialist each year, underscoring the significance of referrals on the healthcare system.
The study by researchers from the University at Buffalo School of Management looked at the impact HIE adoption can have on patient referral patterns.
Researchers used publicly available datasets of 22,000 Medicare beneficiaries in the Western New York region between 2009 and 2012 to analyze patient referral data over time
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/how-remote-patient-monitoring-moving-mainstream
How remote patient monitoring is moving into the mainstream
RPM can greatly aid providers treating chronic conditions, and ease overburdened hospitals. The future of wearables is also looking bright.
By Bill Siwicki
March 08, 2022 01:35 PM
The COVID-19 pandemic most certainly has driven telehealth into the mainstream of healthcare. And one area of telehealth that has seen particularly big gains in the past two years is remote patient monitoring.
RPM benefits healthcare during the pandemic by helping with hospitals already packed to the gills, enabling patients to be monitored and treated at home. Further, RPM has reduced the amount of time patients must spend in situations where the COVID-19 virus can be transmitted.
Beyond the pandemic, RPM can keep patients out of the high-cost setting of a hospital and at home, where, further, the patients will be happier, thus improving the patient experience while reducing those costs.
It's clear RPM will be playing a bigger role in healthcare than it ever has before. On this note, Healthcare IT News spoked with Dr. Waqaas Al-Siddiq, chairman, CEO and founder of Biotricity, a medical diagnostic and healthcare technology company that offers both physician- and consumer-facing RPM devices.
He explained how RPM can help manage chronic conditions and ease the burden on hospitals, described the future of wearables and shared some lessons learned during the pandemic.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/some-important-questions-ai-ethics-and-safety
Some important questions for AI ethics and safety
Whether it's predictive analytics, RPA, NLP or other use cases, health systems should be thinking seriously about context and workflows, says a UC Berkeley expert who will offer examples during HIMSS22 Digital.
By Nathan Eddy
March 08, 2022 12:22 PM
The healthcare industry faces a series of pressing challenges concerning the implementation of safe and ethical artificial intelligence.
But there are resources available for health care teams to help support safe and ethical AI to start them off and set a common foundation for the discussion.
As Jessica Newman, director of the AI Security Initiative at the Center for Long Term Cybersecurity at the University of California, Berkeley, explained there are four common types of AI technologies being implemented in healthcare today.
· The first is predictive and prescriptive analytics, used in healthcare applications like precision medicine, where a system might be used to predict the most successful treatment based upon particular attributes and context.
· The second type of AI is robotic process automation, or RPA, which is designed to automate and replicate relatively simple, rule based administrative processes and health care. This is used for things like updating patient records or billing.
· A third is natural language processing, which enables language applications like speech recognition, text analysis and translation, and can be used to analyze clinical notes or transcribe patient interactions.
· The fourth type of AI technology is computer vision, where machine learning-enabled image analysis can help recognize potentially cancerous lesions in radiology images, support retinal scanning or help detect a brain hemorrhage.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/health-it-developers-take-strides-toward-onc-cures-update-criteria
Health IT Developers Take Strides Toward ONC Cures Update Criteria
Health IT developers must meet ONC Cures Update certification criteria for health data security and interoperability by December 31, 2022.
March 07, 2022 - Health IT developers are making steady progress in fulfilling the new privacy and security certification criteria for the 2015 Edition Cures Update, according to a HealthITBuzz blog post written by ONC officials Jeff Smith, Tony Myers, and Papia Paul.
Approximately 50 percent of certified health IT modules currently support the 2015 Edition Cures Update criterion for encrypting authentication credentials and multi-factor authentication. Additionally, ONC has observed promising growth in the use of more granular security tags to restrict the redisclosure of sensitive information at the data entry level.
However, ONC officials noted that health IT developers must make considerable interoperability advances in the coming months to meet the 2015 Edition Cures Update deadline.
“There are several other important Cures Update certification criteria where considerable progress will need to occur throughout the year to meet the December 31, 2022 deadline, including the new standardized FHIR application programming interface (API) for patient and population services,” Smith, Myers, and Paul wrote.
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https://mhealthintelligence.com/news/1-in-5-patients-find-wearables-hard-to-use
1 in 5 Patients Find Wearables Hard to Use
But despite issues with usability, patients cited several benefits linked to wearables, including gaining a better understanding of their health, a new survey shows.
By Anuja Vaidya
March 07, 2022 - Though a vast majority of healthcare consumers (86 percent) said that wearable devices improved their health and quality of life, 20 percent said that their device is hard to use, according to a new survey.
Conducted by software research firm Software Advice in January, the survey polled 450 US patients who currently use medically prescribed wearable devices.
Nearly half of the patients (49 percent) cited gaining a better understanding of their health as the most significant benefit of using their wearable device, while 27 percent cited an improved quality of life.
About 15 percent of respondents said that the ability to receive remote care was the biggest advantage that wearable devices offer, and 5 percent said it enabled easier collaboration with their physicians.
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Using Online Provider Reviews to Tackle Discrimination, Patient Safety
In absence of other measures, online provider reviews give organizations the data needed to deploy training programs that tackle discrimination to improve patient safety.
By Sara Heath
March 07, 2022 - Online provider reviews can be effective for measuring discrimination in healthcare, according to a recent JAMA Network Open study, granting healthcare organizations the information needed to address racism in medicine as a patient safety issue.
As medical professionals continue to zero in on health equity, the question of discrimination in healthcare has become more pertinent. Explicit and implicit bias in healthcare can be of detriment to the patient experience and patient safety, and it can harm patient trust and discourage future patient care access, most experts agree.
But although understanding discrimination in healthcare is important, there are few mechanisms by which healthcare organizations can measure or document these issues. Poor measurement impedes organizational efforts to improve patient safety and experience through cultural competency and other provider education interventions.
“Traditional health care performance metrics, such as Hospital Compare, do not report on discrimination or health inequities,” the researchers explained.
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https://healthitsecurity.com/news/hc3-outlines-history-of-healthcare-cybersecurity-from-1980s-to-now
HC3 Outlines History of Healthcare Cybersecurity From 1980s to Now
HC3 issued a comprehensive history of major healthcare cybersecurity events spanning from the 1980s to today in order to inform future defense strategies.
By Jill McKeon
March 07, 2022 - As organizations navigate the complexities of the current cyber threat landscape, it is important to take a step back and look at how healthcare cybersecurity has evolved over time. Following this notion, the Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) released a comprehensive brief outlining the history of major healthcare cybersecurity events over the past few decades and predictions for what lies ahead.
Cybercrime has existed for decades, but today’s healthcare cyber threat landscape consists of more sophisticated and effective threat actors than ever before. Supply chain attacks, phishing, remote desktop protocol (RDP), and open-source software compromise all pose significant threats to the healthcare sector.
The first-ever ransomware attack occurred in 1989 and was centered around healthcare, HC3 noted. Biologist Joseph Popp distributed 20,000 trojanized floppy disks at the World Health Organization AIDS conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The disks installed malicious codes and eventually demanded $189 from victims in order to regain access to their systems.
But the first truly significant healthcare cybersecurity event occurred in 2014, when Anonymous attacked the Boston Children’s Hospital with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Through 2015 and 2016, threat actors launched a few other notable attacks against healthcare organizations, accessing protected health information (PHI) and demanding ransoms. These types of attacks occur almost daily in today’s cyber threat landscape.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/emea/nhs-creates-blueprint-testing-bias-ai-models
NHS creates blueprint for testing bias in AI models
Researchers used COVID-19 chest imaging data to assess the accuracy of health and care algorithms.
By Tammy Lovell
March 07, 2022 09:38 AM
The NHS AI LAB has created a blueprint for testing the robustness of artificial intelligence (AI) models, paving the way for safer adoption in health and care.
Working with a research group, the imaging team ran a proof-of-concept validation process on five AI models / algorithms using data from the National COVID-19 Chest Imaging Database (NCCID), a database of chest scans and supporting medical information from NHS trusts.
They tested how accurately the models detected positive and negative COVID-19 cases from medical images and how the models performed with different patient sub-groups e.g. by age, ethnicity, and/or sex.
This validation process will support work at NHS Digital to develop new AI assurance processes and bespoke training, as well as helping to clarify a structure for AI regulations.
The research group was formed by the British Society of Thoracic Imaging, AI firm Faculty, Queen Mary University of London, Royal Surrey Foundation Trust, and the University of Dundee.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/using-ai-and-people-power-combat-sepsis
Using AI and people power to combat sepsis
In a preview of his HIMSS22 session, Dr. Thomas Selva talks through his team's Davies Award-winning strategy to detect the life-threatening condition early.
By Kat Jercich
March 07, 2022 10:03 AM
Sepsis, the body's damaging over-response to an infection, affects at least 1.7 million adults in the United States every year.
Early treatment is key to staying ahead of the condition, which can be life-threatening. But sometimes the clinical signs can be hard to spot – making artificial intelligence tools particularly useful.
This past year, University of Missouri Health Care was recognized with a HIMSS Davies Award for its work pairing the National Early Warning Score algorithm with a rapid response team to contribute to a reduction in sepsis mortality.
Developed by the Royal College of Physicians, "the National Early Warning Score is a wonderful system that uses measures the nurses are already capturing to give you an idea that you might want to take a closer look at your patient, that they might be showing signs of early decline," explained Dr. Thomas Selva, chief medical information officer at MU Healthcare and medical director for the Tiger Institute for Health Innovation.
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https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/revenue-cycle/world-health-organization-releases-icd-11
World Health Organization Releases ICD-11
Analysis | By Amanda Norris | March 04, 2022
Although the U.S. timeline for implementing ICD-11 is still up in the air, the new code set is now officially in effect for the reporting of causes of illness, death, and more.
The World Health Organization (WHO) officially released ICD-11, the newest code set that WHO member countries will be implementing worldwide. According to the WHO press release, 35 countries have already started reporting with ICD-11.
According to the WHO, compared with previous versions, ICD-11 is entirely digital with a new user-friendly format and multilingual capabilities that reduce the chance of error.
"A key principle in this revision was to simplify the coding and provide users with all necessary electronic tooling—this will allow healthcare professionals to more easily and completely record conditions," Robert Jakob, team lead of classifications terminologies and standards at the WHO, said in a press release.
According to the organization, ICD-11 was adopted at the World Health Assembly in May 2019 and at the time, member states committed to start using it for mortality and morbidity reporting in 2022.
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Enjoy!
David.
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