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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Stick-on sensors will let premature babies get the skin contact they need
Babies born too soon have to be closely monitored, but all that equipment stops parents from getting close. A new wireless sensor could help.
- by Charlotte Jee
- February 28, 2019
More than one in 10 babies are born too early. Small and fragile, they often need to be kept warm and monitored closely, usually in a hospital incubator.
It’s a sight that pulls at the heartstrings: a tiny premature baby in a nest of wires, surrounded by equipment. But a new monitoring system could make those wires redundant. It relies on two ultra-thin patches, measuring just a few centimeters across, that are attached to the baby’s chest and foot.
The devices, developed by an interdisciplinary team from Northwestern University, look like clear Band-Aids and contain sensors that track all the baby’s vital signs. They form the first neonatal monitoring system that doesn’t require any wires or batteries.
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The purpose of LHCREs has always been clear – if you were paying attention
For Ewan Davis, the recent reported annoyance over the purpose of local health and care record exemplars (LHCREs) is misplaced – he argues that it was always the intention for LHCREs to enable a national data resource. He also believes that such a resource is necessary and valuable. But he suggests it will only be possible if changes are made and the lessons of the past heeded.
As Jon Hoeksma says in the title of his recent piece, a tug of war over local health and care record exemplars (LHCREs) is underway.
Ewan Davis – 26 February, 2019
The controversy seems to have been ignited by the insistence of Matthew Swindells, NHS England’s deputy chief executive, that the LHCREs should be persisting normalised data at scale to enable a common library of analysis tools to be run across all of them.
This seems to have come as a surprise to some of the LHCREs. But all I can say is that if they are surprised then they really haven’t been paying attention.
The history of the LHCREs can be traced back to a publication emerging from work by Will Smart, chief information officer for health and social care in England. Early versions of the document – which, as reported by Digital Health in January 2017, referred to the creation of a ‘data lake’ – have disappeared from the web. But a later sanitised version of “Enabling evidence based continuous improvement: the target architecture” has been preserved by MedConfidential.
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Ten principles of NHS AI code of conduct published
The ten principles of the NHS’ code of conduct for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and other data-driven technologies has been published.
Hanna Crouch 21 February 2019
Then health minister, Lord O’Shaughnessy, announced in September 2018 that the code of conduct had been published but was in the initial consultation stage.
On 19 February, the Department of Health and Social Care announced an updated version has been released which included ten principles which technology companies are expected to meet and follow.
These principles include understanding user need, being fair and transparent and ensuring the technology is secure. (The full list of principles can be seen below)
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Special Report: Imaging PACS
The Long Term Plan formally enshrines the aim to create diagnostic imaging networks. As Jennifer Trueland reports, such setups will be underpinned by the smart use of technology – and some areas are already showing the way on this front.
Tucked away on page 98 of England’s NHS Long Term Plan is one small paragraph with potentially big implications.
Section 5.28 commits the NHS to developing diagnostic imaging networks to “enable the rapid transfer of clinical images from settings close to the patient to the relevant specialist clinician to interpret”. This will happen by 2023 and will be based on open standards infrastructure.
Although the plan doesn’t specifically mention it, this will also rely on efficient and effective use of picture archiving and communications systems (PACS).
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ML models predict sepsis in neonates hours before clinical recognition
Published March 01 2019, 7:34am EST
Using routine electronic health record data, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have developed machine learning models able to identify infants with sepsis hours before clinical recognition.
The research team conducted a retrospective case-control study that leveraged EHR data from 618 infants hospitalized in CHOP’s neonatal intensive care unit from 2014 to 2017.
In all, eight machine learning models were evaluated for their ability to analyze patient data to predict which infants had sepsis. Of the eight, six models—AdaBoost, gradient boosting, logistic regression, Naïve Bayes, random forest and SVM—performed well in accurately predicting sepsis as much as four hours before clinical recognition of the life-threatening condition.
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FDA post-market drug surveillance system to tap EHR data
Published March 01 2019, 7:28am EST
Sentinel, which monitors FDA-approved drugs through active surveillance, is being enhanced to capture clinical data to better detect potential new safety problems.
“We’ll be working to link claims data in Sentinel to electronic health records, to improve our ability to conduct active surveillance and use real-world data to improve patient outcomes,” testified FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, on Wednesday during a House appropriations subcommittee hearing on the status of the agency’s operations.
“By linking information from electronic health records to the data we have on medical claims through our existing Sentinel system, we’ll be able to get a much more complete picture of potential safety issues post-approval and to advance the use of real world data to study drug effectiveness,” Gottlieb added.
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HIT Think 3 things every CIO should know before they migrate to the cloud
Published March 01 2019, 5:39pm EST
Enterprises are continuing to express their love for the cloud and that’s not surprising. Public cloud security has improved to the extent that enterprises are comfortable with the idea of offloading infrastructure management to other entities. Even highly regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance, are tip-toeing in the direction of the public cloud — albeit with reservations, and with their less-sensitive data and workloads.
Whether or not the shift to the public cloud is feasible varies. It depends on regulatory constraints, geographical boundaries and business stance. However, today the barriers to cloud migration have more to do with process, time and cost than anything else. Many organizations don’t know the best way to get to the public cloud, or they don’t have the skills and dedicated resources available to move their applications there.
But still, in head offices everywhere, the refrain is the same: The cloud is the place to be to deliver more value faster and more efficiently. Shifting to the cloud isn’t just a matter of flipping a switch, however, and the cost savings won’t be automatic if you’re not acting advisedly. As a result, CIOs should keep these three concerns top of mind:
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Implementation best practices: Dealing with the complexity of AI
Four experts in artificial intelligence technology offer advice to healthcare CIOs on how to best begin implementing an AI system.
By Bill Siwicki
February 27, 2019 04:35 PM
Artificial intelligence is just as complex as it sounds. Successful deployment of the various technologies that are necessary for AI to work requires planning and strategy..
To help chief information officers and other IT professionals better understand these best practices for implementing AI at their health systems, hospitals, group practices and other provider organizations, we spoke with four experts in AI technologies who offered their advice for effective rollouts.
Identifying use-cases
Know and understand artificial intelligence use-cases and successes from various vendors, advised Ryan Pretnik, research strategy director at KLAS Research.
“Most healthcare providers should look to find and understand use-cases in the industry and how their peers have adopted AI technology,” he said. “This is a good first step, since there are many AI companies in the market that claim they can help healthcare organizations with AI. Being able to understand use-cases and their successes in the healthcare market, while consulting with clinicians internally on the use-cases, typically helps drive healthcare organizations in the right direction.”
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New app aims to bring Google Glass back to life, gives docs hands-free EHR
seeCOLe integrates with FHIR and APIs to work with a variety of EHRs.
By Diana Manos
March 01, 2019 11:53 AM
The seeCOLe app — worn with Google Glass or Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses — allows doctors to use voice commands to review and document patient information, hands-free. According to Osborne, “it integrates with FHIR APIs in real-time, with no middle man and no transcribing.” It works with any EHR, he added.
WHY IT MATTERS
According to Osborne, the app uses AI and helps diagnose by listening to the patient’s responses. It also allows doctors to search for documentation with a voice request. More than one physician, in different locations, can use the app to converse and do a telehealth consultation together.
Osborne cited research showing that clinicians spend nearly half their time examining data, leaving less time to interact with patients. When physicians can explore EHRs hand-free, it frees them up to multi-task, Osborne added. The apps enhancements make it easier to use and collect data.
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Diabetes patients may benefit from sharing health data
March 1, 2019 - 10:49
Article from Norwegian centre for E-health research
A new system that transfers health data from apps, smart insulin pens and sensors to health personnel may help diabetes patients receive more specific feedback and improved follow up.
By: Mali A. Arnstad
The objective is to investigate how consultations of the future should ideally be, when patients collect more and more health information themselves. Users hope this will lead to fewer visits to the doctor.
Health technology allows patients to control their own daily lives more than ever before.
Whereas diabetes patients previously had to travel to a hospital or GP centre for a check-up, they can now record information in their current location with the aid of apps and other smart technological tools.
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The Oversell And Undersell Of Digital Health
February 27, 2019 10.1377/hblog20190226.63748
Digital health technologies hold great promise to solve some of the biggest problems in our healthcare system, including achieving higher quality, lower cost, and greater access to care. In the January 2019 issue of Health Affairs, we reported that scant evidence exists demonstrating the clinical impact of twenty top-funded digital health companies. These companies tended not to study the clinical effectiveness of their products in terms of key healthcare metrics like patient outcomes, cost, and access to care.
We found 104 peer-reviewed published studies on the products or services of these companies. The majority of the studies were from three companies. Nine companies had no peer-reviewed publications. Only 28% of the studies targeted patients with high-burden, high-cost conditions or risk factors. Healthy volunteers were the most commonly studied population. Further, 15% of all studies assessed the product’s “clinical effectiveness” and only eight studies assessed clinical effectiveness in a high-cost, high-burden population. The eight clinical effectiveness studies measured impact in terms of patient outcomes, while no studies measured impact in terms of cost or access to care. There were no clinical effectiveness studies in heart disease, COPD, mental health conditions, hyperglycemia, or low back pain. Studies that did not assess clinical effectiveness may have intended to validate the product against a gold standard measurement or report feasibility of use.
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Lawmakers press VA officials on EHR modernization, workforce
- By Chase Gunter
- Feb 26, 2019
Officials with the Department of Veterans Affairs touted progress on the agency's 10-year, $16 billion electronic health records modernization push, but appropriators still have concerns about the multi-billion-dollar project.
At a Feb. 26 House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) called achieving interoperability with the Department of Defense's health records system "this committee's top priority."
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) called the cost and length of the project "outrageous." The $16 billion includes a $10 billon contract with Cerner and $6 billion in infrastructure upgrades and project management support.
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At hearing on federal data-privacy law, debate flares over state rules
At a hearing before a US House of Representatives committee, witnesses lock horns over whether state regulations help or hinder data protection for consumers.
by Alfred Ng
February 26, 2019 10:52 AM PST
A congressional hearing on data privacy looked at what lawmakers should include in a federal data-privacy bill.
There's a bipartisan call for a US data-privacy law, but there's a divide when it comes to balancing federal legislation with state rules.
On Tuesday the House Energy and Commerce Committee held its first hearing on data privacy, with a Senate hearing scheduled for Wednesday. Once just a blip on the political radar, data privacy has now set off a roaring alarm, as tech scandals have surfaced regularly over the last few years.
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Texas looking at real-time HIE capability for natural disasters
Published February 28 2019, 7:03am EST
To bolster emergency preparedness, the Lone Star State is considering a health information exchange solution enabling first responders and providers access to electronic medical records during disasters.
The Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies (PULSE) platform, which provides secure exchange of healthcare data across HIE and provider organizations, was developed with support from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and was previously implemented in California as a demonstration.
Last week, George Gooch, CEO of the Texas Health Services Authority, a public-private partnership to promote and coordinate the secure exchange of electronic health information in the state, testified before the Texas House Public Health Committee regarding the need for the capability.
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Rep. Phil Roe has concerns about 10-year VA EHR implementation
Published February 28 2019, 7:12am EST
It will take the Department of Veterans Affairs about a decade to implement its new Cerner electronic health record system—a long, costly ramp-up that is causing heartburn for one senior congressman.
Rep. Phil Roe, MD (R-Tenn.), ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, expressed his concerns during Wednesday’s hearing on the future of the agency to VA Secretary Robert Wilkie.
“The EHR’s developmental and operational costs will be predictable, because VA will have shifted most of them to Cerner,” Roe told Wilkie. “But 11 years is a lifetime in this software industry, and the EHR is just one element—albeit a big element—of the VA’s overall health IT.”
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HIT Think How to bridge the digital gap between physical and behavioral care
By David Conejo
Published February 28 2019, 5:52pm EST
The statistics are terrifying. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Alcohol poisoning kills six people every day. Of those, 76 percent are adults ages 35 to 64, and three of every four people killed by alcohol poisoning are men.
The group with the most alcohol poisoning deaths per million people is American Indians/Alaska Natives (49.1 per 1 million). More than 15 million people struggle with an alcohol use disorder in the United States, but less than eight percent of those receive treatment.
Almost 72,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses, a record high acknowledging an increase of about 10 percent, according to new preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. The death toll is higher than the peak yearly death totals from H.I.V., car crashes and even US gun deaths.
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Unsecure laptops still a major security threat for healthcare
More than 63 percent of laptops have deficiencies of users storing data locally rather than accessing the organization’s programs and data via secure, virtual desktop software, a new report shows.
By Nathan Eddy
February 28, 2019 01:42 PM
Laptops are still one of the components that pose the greatest risk for a cyber intrusion for healthcare systems, according to a report from the Clearwater CyberIntelligence Institute.
The institute found endpoint data loss, excessive user permissions, and dormant accounts make up 70 percent of all high and critical risk scenarios for laptop vulnerabilities at hospitals and health systems across the country.
The results indicated endpoint data loss in particular remains so high because of continued deficiencies in data loss prevention tools and data storage vulnerabilities.
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Dermatology EHR and practice management tech improves care, MIPS performance
Windsor Dermatology made the switch from paper to digital, and says the key was finding a records system specific to the specialty.
By Bill Siwicki
February 28, 2019 01:05 PM
Windsor Dermatology in East Windsor, New Jersey, was looking for a new electronic health record system, but staff knew they needed more than just a typical EHR.
THE PROBLEM
Staff believed the practice needed an EHR that "understood" it was focused on dermatology.
"Meaningful use was looming," said Sunny Holman, practice manager at Windsor Dermatology. "We desperately needed one-system harmony to reduce costs, user errors and employee stress."
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Password managers remain an important security tool despite new vulnerability report
Experts downplay discovery of a vulnerability that can expose passwords in a computer's memory. Hackers likely to take easier paths to stealing passwords.
28 February, 2019 08:04
Security researchers have recently found flaws in several popular password managers that can allow attackers with access to a computer to retrieve passwords from its memory. While the vulnerabilities are real, protecting secrets in memory is an ongoing issue for the software industry, and experts have pointed out that there are much easier ways to steal passwords.
The report that stirred up some controversy in the security community was released last week by Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), a security consultancy with a good track record of finding software vulnerabilities. The company tested the desktop versions of LastPass, Dashlane, 1Password version 4, 1Password version 7 and KeePass. ISE investigated the security guarantees provided by the applications while they were in three states: not running with password vault locked, running with password vault unlocked and running but with password vault locked.
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Bad Actors Getting Your Health Data Is the FBI’s Latest Worry
Emily Mullin February 25, 2019
In February 2015, the health insurer Anthem revealed that criminal hackers had gained access to the company’s servers, exposing the personal information of nearly 79 million patients. It’s the largest known healthcare breach in history.
FBI agents worry that the vast amounts of healthcare data being generated for precision medicine efforts could leave the U.S. vulnerable to cyber and biological attacks.
That year, the data of millions more would be compromised in one cyberattack after another on American insurers and other healthcare organizations. In fact, for the past several years, the number of reported data breaches has increased each year, from 199 in 2010 to 344 in 2017, according to a September 2018 analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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IBM: Cybercriminals abandon ransomware for 'cryptojacking'
As more companies increase their cybersecurity measures and awareness, cybercriminals have started altering their techniques to focus more on return on investment, according to IBM's "2019 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index" report.
The report is based on observations from 70 billion security events that occurred per day between Jan. 1, 2018, and Dec. 31, 2018, across more than 130 countries. Data is analyzed from multiple sources, including IBM Managed Security Services and X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services.
Five things to know:
1. The report details two major shifts among cybercriminals: a decreased reliance on malware and a decline in ransomware attacks.
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Health IT Roundup—UConn Health data breach impacts 300,000 patient records; Cedars-Sinai pilots Amazon Alexa in patient rooms
Feb 27, 2019 12:14pm
UConn Health reports data breach due to phishing attack
The University of Connecticut Health Center is notifying patients of a data breach due to an unauthorized third party illegally accessing employee email accounts. UConn Health learned of the phishing attack on Dec. 24 and determined that some of the accounts contained some personal and medical information, including some patients’ names, dates of birth, addresses and limited medical information, such as billing and appointment information, UConn Health officials said in an announcement posted on its website Friday.
The incident had no impact on the organization’s computer networks or electronic medical record systems, officials said.
A local news station, WFSB, reported that 326,000 patient records may have been exposed, including 1,500 that included Social Security numbers.
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Google, Verily use machine learning to detect diabetic eye disease
Feb 27, 2019 11:43am
For the past three years, Google and Verily—Alphabet’s life sciences and healthcare arm—have been researching the use of machine learning to screen for diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause of preventable blindness in adults.
The result: A machine learning-enabled screening tool that is now in real-world clinical use through Verily and Google’s retinal diagnostic program at Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India, they revealed this week.
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Study finds radiologists easily transition to 3D mammography
By Fred Bazzoli
Published February 27 2019, 7:33am EST
Radiologists can quickly transition to using three-dimensional mammograms from traditional two-dimensional images, yielding benefits in interpreting studies and in patient care.
A study indicates that radiologists who interpret traditional mammograms require little preparation or training in order to make the transition to reading digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT, which uses 3D mammography) with improved screening accuracy.
Those are among the findings of a study conducted at UC Davis, published in Radiology, a professional journal, which reported on expected transition challenges for radiologists juxtaposed against benefits of the new mammography technology.
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Consumer health information is increasingly at risk, groups tell Congress
Published February 27 2019, 7:24am EST
Americans are facing a growing threat to their privacy as their online activities are closely monitored and used to reveal increasingly personal information, including potential details about their state of health.
Sensitive information and changes in daily habits are tracked and sold to third party data mining companies and marketers, according to Brandi Collins-Dexter, a senior campaign director at the Color of Change, the nation’s largest online civil rights organization.
“Internet Service Providers and third party analytics partners can track the times when someone goes online, the sites visited and the physical location,” testified Collins-Dexter on Tuesday before a House subcommittee hearing. “Visits to a doctor’s website or to a prescription refill page could allow the ISP, platform or a data broker partner to infer someone in the household has a specific medical condition.”
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HIT Think How 3 cybersecurity practices can assist smaller hospitals
By Brian Stone
Published February 27 2019, 5:17pm EST
Smaller hospitals don’t get a break from regulators; they have to comply with healthcare laws just as the larger hospitals do.
However, community and regional hospitals typically have far fewer resources to provide the data privacy and security that compliance regulations require. This means their compliance programs may have gaps.
What are organizations with small IT teams to do? How can they create programs that include policies, procedures, ongoing monitoring and remediation efforts to reduce incidents? How can they acquire certified compliance and security savvy and create a culture of privacy, security and compliance?
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Why health orgs are embracing cloud to improve physician and patient experience
Cloud can make technology invisible – something that often improves the work and lives of people who use it.
By Tom Sullivan
February 27, 2019 08:55 AM
Experience. Whether it’s about patients or clinicians, one thing that’s clear is that health insurers and providers, from solo practices to large systems, must improve the experience they deliver or risk losing consumers and employees.
Leading organizations are already headed in that direction and many of them are harnessing cloud apps or services to make it happen.
The beauty of invisible tech
At its most elemental, the cloud can be used to “re-humanize rather than de-humanize healthcare,” said David Vawdrey, vice president for analytics and clinical systems at NewYork-Presbyterian.
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How AI is helping Rohingya refugee health
Monday, 25 February, 2019
Refugee camps are fertile ground for contagious diseases, including skin manifestations.
So for the more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees who’ve fled Myanmar in the past year, finding temporary shelter across the border in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, their overcrowded, unhygienic living conditions have made them vulnerable to infections and other diseases — a problem the United Nations has called “immense”, with healthcare services “grossly under-funded.”
Help in addressing these distant needs is coming from a Silicon Valley healthcare start-up, Polyfins, whose AI-powered mobile app can help dermatologists diagnose skin conditions that often hold strong clues to underlying disease — ranging from common conditions like eczema to serious ones like tumours, infections and parasitic infestations.
Polyfins, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program, worked with Bangladeshi authorities to bring two dermatologists and several nurses to the refugee camp. The team saw around 500 patients over two days.
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Feb. 25, 2019 / 12:30 PM
Study: Self-monitoring diets not time-consuming, work best
Feb. 25 (UPI) -- At a time when people use smart devices to track simple fitness goals, researchers say that approach may also help people lose weight.
For six months, participants recorded their calories and fat for all foods and drinks they consumed, along with how much they consumed and how they cooked it. The method is not that time consuming, and can help make a diet more successful, researchers report in a study published Monday in the journal Obesity.
The perception is that it takes too much time and energy to record dietary intake, but the study shows this to be untrue. The average study participant took just under 15 minutes each day to track what they ate on a web-based system.
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HHS sets release date for interoperability rule: 3 things to know
HHS will formally publish CMS and ONC guidelines to the 21st Century Cures Act: Interoperability, Information Blocking and the ONC Health IT Certification Program March 4.
Three things to know:
1. The rules include a 60-day comment period, open to responses from the public until May 3. The comment period will begin March 4.
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The challenges, opportunities of patient-generated data
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT released a white paper outlining the opportunities, challenges and security concerns patient-generated health data presents to digital health, according to an article on the American Medical Association's website.
Like all data, patient-generated health data "may be at risk for security breaches that could affect the integrity of the data and expose the data to access for malicious purposes because they are not subject to the same security regulatory framework as HIPAA-regulated entities," the ONC report stated. "Concerns include insecure points of data collection and insecure data movement that potentially expose the device or the clinician’s information system to pollutants, such as malware."
The ONC report also identified several opportunities patient-generated health data provides for improving health, such as showing a more holistic picture of a patient's health over time; strengthening the patient-physician relationship by creating an individualized care plan; and giving researchers access to a larger pool of data.
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Study: Poor hospital-home health communication puts patients at risk
Published February 26 2019, 7:29am EST
More than half of Colorado home health care clinicians say they have received insufficient information from hospitals to guide patient management, according to a new statewide survey.
In the survey of home health care nurses and staff, conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, 60 percent of respondents indicated they had not received enough information to guide patient treatment, while 44 percent reported encountering problems related to inadequate patient information.
“We have heard of medication errors occurring between hospitals and home healthcare providers,” says Christine Jones, MD, assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “As a result, patients can receive the wrong medication or the wrong dose. Some home health providers don’t get accurate information about how long to leave a urinary catheter or intravenous line in.”
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HIT Think 8 trends affecting data management, the cloud and AI strategies
By Ravi Mayuram
Published February 26 2019, 5:41pm EST
Organizations can expect to see a number of dramatic trends regarding data management, analytics and artificial intelligence this year. Informatoin Management recently spoke with Couchbase Chief Technology Officer Ravi Mayuram for his predictions on which trends will have the greatest impact. Here are his top eight.
The database sprawl will continue as different types of databases proliferate
App developers are creating a lot of data in a lot of different ways, but it’s all bumping into each other without a servicized solution that offers flexibility to house and manage this data. As it stands, developers are using multiple databases for each individual application, creating a database sprawl as users cobble together multiple databases to plug different holes in the system. While the short-term gain of being able to use emerging technologies and have many choices seems great upfront, companies need to consider their long-term goals, rather than select a cobbled together, quick solution.
App developers are creating a lot of data in a lot of different ways, but it’s all bumping into each other without a servicized solution that offers flexibility to house and manage this data. As it stands, developers are using multiple databases for each individual application, creating a database sprawl as users cobble together multiple databases to plug different holes in the system. While the short-term gain of being able to use emerging technologies and have many choices seems great upfront, companies need to consider their long-term goals, rather than select a cobbled together, quick solution.
Multi-cloud implementations suffer new issues from lack of interoperability across clouds
As providers continue to innovate before standardizing processes and interoperability, problems will arise in multi-cloud environments because providers have created interfaces with slightly different ways of working. For example, Google and Amazon each have their own messaging systems, as does Kafka, and applications developed do not simply move to another without undergoing changes. In 2019, these issues will come to light – and users will experience many headaches before true interoperability is achieved across multi-cloud deployments.
As providers continue to innovate before standardizing processes and interoperability, problems will arise in multi-cloud environments because providers have created interfaces with slightly different ways of working. For example, Google and Amazon each have their own messaging systems, as does Kafka, and applications developed do not simply move to another without undergoing changes. In 2019, these issues will come to light – and users will experience many headaches before true interoperability is achieved across multi-cloud deployments.
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German health minister sets digitalisation as a top priority for new initiative
The Global Health Hub Germany initiative was launched last week.
By Tammy Lovell
February 26, 2019 10:30 AM
What happened
Digitalisation was listed as a top priority for the Global Health Hub Germany initiative, which kicked off last week.
Speaking at the launch event in Berlin, German federal health minister Jens Spahn said one of the project’s aims was to “promote the digitalisation of healthcare internationally”.
The health hub will also focus on the fight against tropical diseases, cancer and antibiotic resistance.
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Hacking and IT incidents causing bigger breaches in healthcare
The total number of breaches is at a three-year low, but the incidents are larger, affect more people – and are often caused by underprotected IT environments, according to a new Bitglass report.
February 26, 2019 10:40 AM
While the number of healthcare breaches has decreased in recent years, the number of individuals affected by such breaches skyrocketed in 2018, according to a new report from cloud security firm Bitglass.
Its 2019 Healthcare Breach Report, based on data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Wall of Shame, shows a shifting threat landscape – with hacking and IT incidents now responsible for more breaches than any other cause.
WHY IT MATTERS
The Bitglass analysis finds that while the number of breaches hit a three-year low in 2018, at 290, the average number of individuals affected per breach was 39,739 in 2018 – more than twice the average of 2017.
The Bitglass analysis finds that while the number of breaches hit a three-year low in 2018, at 290, the average number of individuals affected per breach was 39,739 in 2018 – more than twice the average of 2017.
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Why home healthcare workers need access to hospital EHRs
With fewer than half of HHC clinicians having the ability to view patient data in an EHR, new research finds giving them the option could reduce medical errors.
By Nathan Eddy
February 26, 2019 10:20 AM
Major gaps in communication exist between hospital and home health care (HHC) clinicians, which could lead to potentially deadly medical errors, a University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus study found.
WHY IT MATTERS
The study that concluded providing electronic health record access for HHC clinicians would be a promising solution to improve the quality of communication.
Although almost all (96 percent) indicated that internet-based access to a patient's hospital record would be at least somewhat useful, fewer than half reported having access to EHRs for referring hospitals or clinics.
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Considering a cloud-first strategy? Start by knowing that it doesn't mean cloud-only
With cloud computing gaining traction in healthcare, executives who have already started down the path to cloud-first offer advice for others.
By Tom Sullivan
February 26, 2019 09:21 AM
More and more hospitals are moving data and apps into the cloud and taking advantage of storage and compute resources via infrastructure as a service offerings.
Gartner predicted that the overall cloud computing market will expand by 17 percent annually during the next three years to $206 billion — and continued growth is expected in healthcare as well.
“We’re kind of nearing the tipping point with significant growth and acceleration around cloud, and with the frequency with which U.S. hospitals continue to invest in cloud,” said Janet King, senior director of market insights at HIMSS Media.
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Plan OK’d for patient access to 2 closed hospitals’ records
February 24, 2019 10:42 AM,
Updated February 24, 2019 10:43 AM
PHOENIX
The closure of two Arizona hospitals last summer left hundreds of former patients unable to get their medical records, but a judge's order for temporary reactivation of the closed hospitals' record systems could be the answer.
Creditors for Florence Hospital at Anthem and Gilbert Hospital bickered for months over who should cover the cost of accessing the repossessed electronics-records system.
An appeal is possible, but a Maricopa County Superior Court judge last Wednesday approved a plan to take $92,000 from the hospitals' assets to pay for reactivating the records.
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Bankrupt Arizona hospitals ordered to give former patients access to their EHRs
After leaving more than 300 patients without access to their medical records, two closed Arizona hospitals were ordered by a judge to temporarily reactivate their record systems and allow patient access, according to the Miami Herald.
Florence (Ariz.) Hospital at Anthem and Gilbert (Ariz.) Hospital, both bankrupt, were in a dispute with creditors about maintaining the EHRs. New York investment company Indigo-DLI Holdings was the hospitals' senior creditor, and Medhost oversaw the EHRs. Somerset Capital Group provided computer servers to host the EHRs.
The disagreement between the organizations and Resolute Commercial Services, appointed to manage the hospitals' affairs, left the patients without access to their records. Resolute and Medhost proposed an agreement to reopen the EHRs for 90 days, partially financed by Indigo and Resolute.
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Machine Learning Targets the Opioid Crisis
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital recognized that the same kind of machine learning concepts used for cybersecurity could be used to fight the opioid crisis.
2/22/2019 08:00 AM
The core business of healthcare organizations is to care for the medical needs of patients. Yet information security is a key component of any healthcare organization. There are electronic healthcare records (EHRs) and HIPAA privacy regulations, both of which make your average hospital or big healthcare practice an enticing target for hackers looking to steal data.
"We are attacked about a million times a day," said Jennings Aske, chief information security officer at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Aske joined the organization in 2015 to create a cyber security strategy for the organization, and he used platforms from Splunk which he said was "basically a security analytics platform." The system allows the hospital to ingest logs from antivirus software, from the millions of events on the hospital's firewall, from the attacks on user accounts, and more. Using rules in Splunk, Aske's group is able to winnow down all that data to "a handful of events that we want to investigate. It gets us to the needles in the haystack."
Besides protecting data from outside threats, the organization also needed to protect health records from being available to be viewed by unauthorized personnel.
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Pfizer, Ochsner Health team up for clinical trial innovation
The pharma company and health system are looking to create digital tools to help make clinical trials easier for patients, clinicians and researchers.
By Laura Lovett
February 20, 2019
Looking to innovate in the research space, pharma giant Pfizer inked a deal with Ochsner Health System, a Louisiana academic healthcare system, to develop digital tools for clinical trials. The partners will be using Ochsner’s innovation lab, innovationOchsner, and Ochsner Research.
The multi-year strategic alliance revolves around a goal of improving “access and connectivity to clinical trials for patients, with the ultimate goal of better experiences and outcomes.” Angling to reduce paperwork and make the system more user friendly, the pair will offer new digital tools to patients and clinicians.
Why it matters
The duo said that the new tools could make clinical trials easier fo patients, providers and researchers.
Researchers from the companies have already been able to transfer mock data from Ochsner’s EHR system to Pfizer’s electronic data capture system, which the companies said could help address interoperability problems. The digital tools that come out of the project have the potential to be an alternative to the status quo of manually entering new data for each clinical trial.
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More wearables shift from fitness to clinical use with new Samsung and AT&T smartwatches
Feb 25, 2019 10:20am
More wearables are jumping into the health and medical space with a new Samsung Galaxy Watch Active promising a feature the Apple Watch doesn’t yet have: blood pressure monitoring.
Apple’s latest version of its smartwatch, the Apple Watch Series 4, features a built-in electrocardiogram feature and fall detection. Samsung’s newest smartwatch for the consumer market features exercise, sleep, stress and health tracking features as well as an upcoming blood pressure tracking feature.
According to a Samsung release, starting March 15, users can download MY BP Lab, the research app jointly developed with the University of California, San Francisco, directly to the Galaxy Watch Active to monitor blood pressure.
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Health IT Roundup—Apps share sensitive health data with Facebook; Stanford issues ethical guidelines for digital health
Feb 25, 2019 3:31pm
11.5M healthcare records exposed in 2018; hacking accounts for nearly half of data breaches
The number of reported healthcare breaches in 2018 reached a three-year low of 290, but the number of healthcare records breached has more than doubled since 2017, according to a report from Bitglass.
According to Bitglass’ fifth annual healthcare breach report, which analyzes data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ breach portal, 11.5 million healthcare records were exposed last year, up significantly compared to 4.7 million records exposed in 2017.
Hacking and IT incidents accounted for nearly half (46%) of breaches, followed by unauthorized access and disclosure accounting for 36% of breach incidents, according to the report. The number of breaches caused by lost and stolen devices has decreased by almost 70% since 2014.
The average number of individuals affected per breach was 39,739 in 2018—more than twice the average of 2017. (Report)
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Benefits staff want permission to trawl through patient records
Mark Bridge, Technology Correspondent
GPs have raised privacy concerns over plans by the Department for Work and Pensions for an automated system to access benefit claimants’ medical records.
The department intends to give its agents faster access to citizens’ health data to help them to determine the level of benefits to award. It plans to automate “routine” requests for details such as conditions diagnosed or hospital stays and to provide a digital means for inquiries to be made into how a condition affects a patient’s daily life.
GPs said that they were very concerned that increased digital trawling of medical records would undermine patients’ trust in their confidentiality.
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UCSF leverages blockchain for secure sharing of clinical trial data
Published February 25 2019, 7:25am EST
Researchers at UC San Francisco say they have successfully developed and validated the feasibility of using blockchain technology to securely share clinical trial data.
The way the proof-of-concept web portal operates is that each time new data is entered on a trial participant, the sender, receiver, timestamp and file attachment containing the data—as well as the hash of the previous block of data pertaining to that patient—is recorded onto a new block with its own distinct signature.
“We showed that a blockchain-based file and data structure could be used to reliably safeguard data in a clinical trials network, and provide an immutable and fully traceable audit trail,” conclude the authors of a study published on Friday in the journal Nature Communications.
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Warner seeks guidance on bulking up healthcare cybersecurity
Published February 25 2019, 5:27pm EST
The risk of cyberattacks on the healthcare industry is getting Congressional attention, with a key senator asking for guidance on how to improve security.
Mark Warner (D-Va.), co-chair of the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus, is asking federal agencies and healthcare trade associations for details on measures being taken by the federal government to ameliorate security vulnerabilities in the healthcare industry.
Warner is seeking guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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AI set to transform digital pathology for hospitals, says Frost & Sullivan
A new report sees hospitals and diagnostic labs becoming the biggest adopters of digital pathology tools – and says vendors can boost their chances of approval and commercialization by staying focused on cost optimization for clinicians.
By Mike Miliard
February 25, 2019 04:06 PM
A big shift is coming for digital pathology and artificial intelligence, as focus moves from the pharma sector toward clinical diagnostics in hospitals and laboratories, according to a new report by Frost & Sullivan.
WHY IT MATTERS
According to the research – which explores the next decade or so for digital whole slide scanning, imaging solutions, data repository and more – changes are coming for those technologies (and those who use them) as artificial intelligence impacts how and where the digital tools are employed.
According to the research – which explores the next decade or so for digital whole slide scanning, imaging solutions, data repository and more – changes are coming for those technologies (and those who use them) as artificial intelligence impacts how and where the digital tools are employed.
"Once they are established as primary and secondary diagnostic tools, clinicians will be able to decrease turnaround time, prioritize critical cases and improve overall patient outcomes," according to Frost & Sullivan. "However, for AI tools to gain regulatory approval for primary diagnosis in digital pathology, it is imperative to adopt a parallel workflow to showcase the superior benefits of pathology diagnoses that amass data."
Among the advances and evolutions in the space in the near-term future, Frost & Sullivan sees wider use and better management of the clinical datasets owned by major medical institutions as a major boon for developers of digital pathology tech.
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First fax machines, now pagers: NHS to get rid of the outdated gadgets by end of 2021
Figures indicate that the NHS is using around 130,000 pagers at an annual cost of £6.6m.
February 25, 2019 07:08 AM
NHS trusts will have to remove pagers for non-emergency communications by the end of 2021, health and social care secretary Matt Hancock announced on Saturday, and ensure they have a strategy and infrastructure in place to enable the switch to modern alternatives by October next year.
The move follows a series of initiatives launched by Hancock since taking on the health secretary role in July 2018, which aim to overhaul the use of technology across the NHS.
In December, he announced that NHS trusts would not be allowed to purchase fax machines, starting from January this year, and would have to phase out the outdated gadgets by April 2020.
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Top News - Allscripts
Allscripts shares closed down 11 percent Friday following its quarterly revenue and earnings miss.
A $10,000 investment in Allscripts on the day Paul Black was hired as CEO in 2012 would be worth $9,925 today vs. around $13,200 if you had instead bought a Nasdaq index fund.
From the investor call:
- The company in Q4 signed three new Sunrise clients, one Paragon expansion, six FollowMy Health sales, and six new 2BPrecise clients.
- The revenue and earnings problems were spread equally between the now-divested Netsmart and the rest of the Allscripts business, the latter primarily driven by delayed upgrades.
- Black says the company will continue to look for “strategic assets” to acquire, as “the marketplace is littered with undersized companies, some of which have some pretty good technology.”
- President Rick Poulton said that the company has spent a net zero amount on its acquisition winners and losers, including the turnaround acquisition of McKesson’s business and the “very speculative investment” the company made in NantHealth. He added that it’s frustrating to watch MDRX share price performance and further commented that the company needs to “balance why we buy somebody else’s earnings at a big premium when ours are trading so cheap.”
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Weekly News Recap
- Allscripts announces Q4 results that fall short of revenue and earnings expectations.
- Provider management and credentialing software vendor Symplr will acquire workforce management tech company API Healthcare from Veritas Capital
- Unsealed testimony reveals that a focus of the Amazon – Berkshire – JPMorgan healthcare organization will be to make health insurance and prescription drug prices easier to understand
- Healthcare experts file a Federal Trade Commission complaint against Facebook over security problems with its Groups functions that exposed the personal information of patient advocacy groups
- A patient of a closed Arizona hospital is prevented from obtaining life-saving surgery because her medical history is stored in an EHR that was shut down as creditors argued over payments
- HIMSS gives a preview of the “evolution of the HIMSS Brand”
- Virence Health will retire the company name it created in October 2018 and will instead operate as Athenahealth after acquiring that company five weeks later
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Enjoy!
David.
