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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Why good cyber hygiene can help fight NHS data breaches
In September, NHS Digital launched an a campaign to raise staff awareness around basic cyber security. Following on from this, the organisation’s deputy chief executive and senior information risk owner, Rob Shaw, talks about the importance of good cyber hygiene to help fight data breaches and security risks in the NHS.
DHI Admin – 30 October, 2019
Handwashing is something so routine to clinical staff that it is carried out as a matter of habit and viewed as an essential part of keeping people safe. We all need to routinely display the same levels of care towards cyber security, to keep our patients – and ourselves – safe.
This is the simple message we are communicating to NHS staff via our recently launched Keep IT Confidential cyber workforce campaign.
The campaign seeks to embed habits that will become an everyday part of people’s behaviour. This means raising the level of attention people pay to the security of information in their workplace to protect patient data, health care records and details of IT systems.
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Special Report: Mental Health
Patient-facing software is being increasingly used to support the quick identification of someone who’s experiencing a downturn in their mental health. Claire Read explores whether patient-facing apps can be used to support earlier and more appropriate intervention in the event of mental ill health.
Chris O’Sullivan has been interested in the potential of digitisation to deliver better mental health for about 20 years – “since the internet was an infant,” he says with a smile.
It’s a period during which, he points out, greater access to digital has affected a multitude of contributors to our mental wellbeing.
“It’s fundamentally changed or developed the ways in which we connect, communicate, find meaning, express ourselves, generate content, expect feedback,” argues O’Sullivan, head of business development and engagement at the Mental Health Foundation.
And he suggests that means a natural conclusion about how healthcare could best be delivered.
“When we are thinking about how we might want to or need to interact with health professionals, particularly in relation to our mental health, there’s a logical expectation that digital might be part of the picture,” he says.
“When we are thinking about how we might want to or need to interact with health professionals, particularly in relation to our mental health, there’s a logical expectation that digital might be part of the picture,” he says.
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What Happens to Stolen Healthcare Data?
As patients demand increased security for their medical records, healthcare organizations face an uphill challenge to protect the data.
by Andrew Steger Oct 30 2019
Year after year, data breaches are becoming an increasingly critical issue for the healthcare industry. Nearly 32 million records have been exposed through June of this year alone —more than double the number for 2018.
“Health information is a treasure trove for criminals,” Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer of Carbon Black, tells HealthTech. “By compromising it, by stealing it, by having it sold, you have seven to 10 personal identifying characteristics of an individual.”
It’s no surprise, then, that the high value of medical records on the dark web has surpassed that of social security and credit card numbers. These records can sell for up to $1,000 online, depending on the completeness of the information contained within, according to Experian.
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Vendor sets plan to gather diverse clinical data for AI
October 31, 2019, 11:08 p.m. EDT
An Australian company is offering a creative solution to building the datasets needed to build artificial intelligence products.
The approach seeks participation from clinics around the world to contribute information and share in the proceeds that result from the end-products.
The concept is being pitched by Presagen, which bills itself as an online platform for clinics to safely and privately connect global medical data with artificial intelligence to co-create scalable and unbiased medical products.
The Adelaide, Australia-based company unveiled the proposal at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas this week. Under the plan, the company says it wants to crowdsource globally diverse datasets to build AI medical products. More data will result in AI products that are robust, scalable and unbiased, company executives contend.
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Report: Some clinicians believe tech adoption is more about politics, less about improving care
The paper, which looked at the development, procurement and use of data-driven technologies for healthcare, was published earlier this week.
November 01, 2019 09:02 AM
The adoption of technology in the NHS is more closely tied to meeting a “political or commercial imperative” rather than improving care, according to about a dozen stakeholders from across the health system who were interviewed for a new report.
Published by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, or RSA, the “Patient AI” paper - first covered by the Health Service Journal - sought to identify how the introduction of emerging technologies was “influencing commissioning and clinical practice” across the NHS.
The RSA said understanding and agreeing on the purposes for the deployment of new tools and systems needed to be the “starting point for a more constructive conversation” in order to tackle the “embedded scepticism” that it was not being done for the right reasons.
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Wearables prove reliable in determining mortality risk in adults, study shows
Data from the accelerometers allowed researchers to correctly rank the mortality risk using 30-40 percent more accuracy than when using data about smoking status or a patient's stroke or cancer history.
By Nathan Eddy
November 01, 2019 11:03 AM
Wearable health devices can provide an accurate picture of the overall health and mortality risk in older adults, according to a federally funded study by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers and published in the October issue of The Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.
WHY IT MATTERS
The study indicated wearable devices like fitness trackers, smart health watches, heart rate monitors and GPS tracking devices are more effective than patient surveys and other methodologies in providing key predictors of mortality
The study indicated wearable devices like fitness trackers, smart health watches, heart rate monitors and GPS tracking devices are more effective than patient surveys and other methodologies in providing key predictors of mortality
Participants in the Johns Hopkins survey wore an accelerometer device at the hip for seven consecutive days, removing it only when sleeping, showering or swimming.
The data researchers received from the accelerometers allowed them to correctly rank the mortality risk using 30 percent more accuracy than when using information about smoking status, and 40 percent better than using information about whether a person suffered a stroke or had cancer.
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Tech optimization: fine-tuning approaches to healthcare analytics
In this special feature story, three analytics experts offer healthcare CIOs and other IT leaders some best practices for getting analytics to work.
By Bill Siwicki
November 01, 2019 01:03 PM
Analytics technology has proven itself immensely valuable to healthcare provider organizations. It helps both clinical and administrative leaders throughout an organization improve care, trim costs and gain efficiencies.
But to get the biggest bang for the buck, CIOs and other leaders throughout the healthcare enterprise must optimize analytics to work best for their organization. Analytics is not a simple plug-and-play offering. Leaders must fine-tune the technology and the approach to the technology so it works to best fit their organization’s needs.
Here, three healthcare analytics experts offer best practices when it comes to optimizing analytics technology to best meet the needs of an individual healthcare provider organization.
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Healthcare Sensor Innovations Moving Closer To Mainstream
November 1, 2019
It’s been at least a decade since I first started hearing about the great things that would someday come out of the integration of sensors into the healthcare technology set. (Remember sensor socks?) Now, it could be that some of that promise is on the verge of being realized.
According to IDTechEx technology analysts Dr. Nadia Tsao and Dr. Ivan De Backer, a few trends attracted a lot of buzz at the recent Healthcare Sensor Innovations 2019 show.
One hot topic at the show was the benefits of integrating printed electronics into healthcare devices, Tsao and De Backer said. Since electronics can be printed on a wide variety of materials, including plastic, textiles, paper and foil, device makers can create flexible, foldable and stretchable medical sensors that can be used in far more settings than rigid electronics. To make sure patients are comfortable, it will be particularly important that sensors come in flexible and thin form factors, especially when creating electronic skin patches and smart clothing, speakers said.
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Google Acquires Fitbit for $2.1 Billion – What’s That Mean for Healthcare?
November 1, 2019
The big healthcare news today was something we’d heard rumored for a few days already. Google will be acquiring Fitbit for the tidy sum of $2.1 billion (See the Google announcement and Fitbit press release for details). This number is particularly interesting since Fitbit’s IPO in 2015 that valued it at $4.1 billion. Hard to process a loss of $2 billion in 4 years, but Fitbit has been on a steady decline since it’s IPO.
Considering the billions of dollars Google has laying around, it’s hard to argue that this bargain buy is going to be a bad thing for Google that has been investing a lot of money in the wearable space. No doubt having the Fitbit brand under them and more importantly the wearable expertise, experience, and patents are going to be extremely valuable to Google as it battles other tech companies in the wearable space.
While this is an interesting play for Google, it begs the broader question: What Does Google’s Acquisition of Fitbit mean for healthcare?
I’ve long been sharing that the problem with Fitbit for healthcare is that the data it was collecting wasn’t medically relevant. When you took your Fitbit data into the doctor, they had no idea what to do with it or had it was clinically relevant to them. The reality is that it hasn’t been clinically relevant to doctors and so they haven’t done much with it beyond uploading it to the EHR to be stored where no one sees it.
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Google buys Fitbit for $2.1 billion
The fitness tracking company will join Google
Google has just announced that it’s buying wearable company Fitbit for $2.1 billion. In a blog post announcing the news, Google SVP of devices and services Rick Osterloh said that the Fitbit purchase is “an opportunity to invest even more in Wear OS as well as introduce Made by Google wearable devices into the market.”
The news comes just days after a report from Reuters, which claimed that Google was in talks to buy the popular fitness tracker company.
“Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.“
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Senators introduce bill to expand use of telehealth in Medicare
October 30, 2019, 11:32 p.m. EDT
Six U.S. senators on Wednesday introduced legislation aimed at tearing down the barriers to the use of telehealth services for Medicare beneficiaries.
Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), John Thune (R-S.D.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) introduced the bipartisan Creating Opportunities Now for Necessary and Effective Care Technologies (CONNECT) for Health Act of 2019.
According to the lawmakers, their bill will improve health outcomes, make it easier for patients to connect with their physicians, as well as help cut costs for patients and providers.
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The EMR has changed the doctor-patient duet into a ménage-à-trois
By
October 31, 2019
You would have thought that my hospital was preparing for the imminent coming of the messiah. Digital countdown clocks posted around the hospital ticked down the weeks, days, minutes, and seconds till the vaunted day. For months, every medical, logistical, academic, and intrapersonal transaction was beholden to April 1.
That the hospital had chosen April Fools’ Day to transition hundreds of thousands of patients and their clinicians to a new electronic medical record (EMR) was either a cosmic oversight or some techie’s idea of wit. But on April 1, our old system with its 20 years of painstakingly accrued data was put out to pasture and we entered the new world of Epic, which is now the predominant electronic medical record in the U.S.
A hospital is more than a building. Some liken it to a beehive, but it’s more like a Borgesian labyrinth with an unimaginable number of functionalities. A hospital is designed to attend to everything from kidney stones and paralysis to psychosis and sore throats. It has to juggle blood transfusions, premature labor, insurance forms, ingrown toenails, cardiac arrests, and diabetic meals.
So it’s no surprise that the electronic medical systems that accommodate a hospital’s dizzying variety of tasks are monstrously complex beasts. In order to go live on April Fools’ Day, the thousands of employees who occupy hundreds of different cogs in our hospital’s machinery all had to be trained to learn the gargantuan system.
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The count of managed service providers getting hit with ransomware mounts
Threat researchers tracking public reports of MSP ransomware incidents up count to 13 this year.
Sean Gallagher - 10/31/2019, 8:00 AM
When more than 20 local governments in Texas were hit this summer by ransomware in one day. The attack was apparently tracked back to one thing the organizations had in common: a managed service provider. With limited IT resources of their own, local governments have increasingly turned to MSPs to operate significant portions of their networks and applications, as have other organizations and businesses—often placing critical parts of their business operations in the MSPs' hands. And that has made MSPs a very attractive target to ransomware operators.
Threat researchers at the global cloud security provider Armor have been tracking publicly-reported incidents in which MSP and cloud service providers have been hit with ransomware. Thus far, they have documented 13 such incidents this year—with 6 of them reported in the past few months.
The most recent publicly exposed victim is Billtrust, which as security journalist Brian Krebs reported, was hit by what BleepingComputer reported was BitPaymer ransomware (a report that has not been confirmed). BillTrust is an online invoicing and billing provider based in New Jersey that also provides credit decision services. Billtrust executives sent an email to customers on October 22, informing them of the attack, stating:
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HIMSS Australia Digital Health Summit breakout track in focus: Data track
With the explosion in the amount of healthcare data being collected, one of the key challenges lie in the quality of data, as well as making the right decisions to use the appropriate data to measure specific health outcomes or predictions.
By Dean Koh
October 31, 2019 01:20 AM
One of the three breakout tracks at the upcoming HIMSS Australia Digital Health Summit (ADHS) happening from 20-21 November 2019 in Sydney, Australia is the data track. This article will look at the broader context of how healthcare data is being used and applied in Australia, as well as the steps taken towards enhancing the interoperability framework of healthcare in the country.
Better quality data, better health outcomes and predictions?
With the explosion in the amount of healthcare data being collected, one of the key challenges lie in the quality of data being collected, as well as making the right decisions to use the appropriate data to measure specific health outcomes or predictions. One such example in Australia is the recent announcement of a joint project to develop clinical decision support software employing predictive analytics by the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre, Melboune's RMIT University and Telstra Health.
The aim is to better understand reliable signs of patient deterioration, thereby keep more aged care residents out of the emergency room, as well as detect end-of-life indicators earlier on. Through the A$1 million partnership, the newly-developed algorithms will first be tested using historical data, then applied to fresh data in a trial setting, before they are integrated into Telstra's clinical and care management software.
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Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent to introduce new integrated care record
Graphnet awarded contract to link NHS and local government organisations in the area.
By Tammy Lovell
October 31, 2019 11:58 AM
Software provider Graphnet has been awarded a contract to provide a single integrated care record in England's Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent area.
The project will link NHS and local government organisations for the region’s care professionals and 1.1 million residents. It will involve integrating 151 GP practices, two acute trusts, three community and mental health trusts, two councils and six clinical commissioning groups (CCGs).
Graphnet will provide its CareCentric software, which allows clinical and social care information to be shared between disciplines and across organisations.
Patients will also be able to access the myCareCentric personal health record which makes it possible for them to view their records online and manage elements of their own care.
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UTHealth working with three big partners on new machine learning techniques
The Houston health system is enlisting technology and services help from Virtusa, Cardinal Health and Amazon Web Services to explore ways cloud-based AI can help manage diabetes and subarachnoid hemorrhage.
By Mike Miliard
October 31, 2019 12:11 PM
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston has partnered with a trio of tech companies for extensive new research into how electronic health record data can be harnessed by new AI algorithms to improve diagnosis and treatment.
WHY IT MATTERS
The Chair of UTHealth's Department of Biostatistics & Data Science, Hulin Wu, PhD, will lead a team of researchers focused first on innovating strategies for managing an acute condition, subarachnoid hemorrhage, and a chronic one, diabetes, using advanced computer simulations.
The Chair of UTHealth's Department of Biostatistics & Data Science, Hulin Wu, PhD, will lead a team of researchers focused first on innovating strategies for managing an acute condition, subarachnoid hemorrhage, and a chronic one, diabetes, using advanced computer simulations.
Virtusa and Cardinal Health will help UTHealth build a comprehensive dataset of deidentified EHR data from som 30,000 patients, made available using Virtusa's vLife cloud-hosting platform, deployed via Amazon Web Services' AWS Marketplace.
Using vLife technology, which comprises data lake capabilities, pre-built APIs, machine learning models and more, UTHealth researchers – data scientists, clinicians, epidemiologists, informaticians and computer scientists – aim spot hidden trends in the data that might lead to new treatments or cures for those and, eventually, other medical conditions.
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Telehealth Partnership Puts Cleveland Clinic On The Road to Virtual Hospital Deployment
October 31, 2019
At first glance, the news item didn’t seem that noteworthy. The Cleveland Clinic, which has worked with telehealth vendor American Well since 2014, has been delivering routine care and access to a small selection of specialists. Now, it had announced that it was going to mount a joint venture with AmWell to offer virtual care.
After digging in a bit, though, I realized that there was some interesting information here. The new venture, dubbed The Clinic, isn’t just delivering virtual visits via a new corporate entity (yawn!). Instead, the new venture will be in a new business, offering “comprehensive and high-acuity care services” and access to a “wide array” of specialties. This isn’t just a new telehealth offering – it’s a step that moves Cleveland Clinic down the road towards offering a virtual hospital service.
*That* is another thing entirely. Not only does the new venture open up some great digital health opportunities (particularly a vibrant channel for selling its sought-after specialists) it also positions the organization to reinvent itself as telehealth becomes central to its mission.
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Final ONC, CMS interoperability rules under review by OMB
Oct 30, 2019 1:55pm
Two major federal rules aimed at stopping information blocking and spurring data sharing are now one step closer to being finalized.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's (ONC) interoperability and information blocking rule is now under review at the Office of Management and Budget, the last step before publication.
ONC delivered the rule to OMB Oct. 28, as first reported by Politico. ONC released its proposed information blocking rule (PDF) in February that outlines seven exceptions to the prohibition against information blocking and provides standardized criteria for application programming interface (API) development.
Despite calls by many industry groups to slow down and issue a supplemental notice of rule-making instead, ONC appears to be moving ahead with finalizing the rule. The rules were submitted to OMB as final rules, not interim final rules.
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Here's a look at some trends we spotted at HLTH 2019
by Tina Reed, Paige Minemyer |
Oct 30, 2019 3:06pm
FierceHealthcare headed to the HLTH 2019 conference in Las Vegas this week. Here's a look at some of our takeaways from our time there.
How far can we go with consumerism in healthcare?
It's no surprise that some of the biggest names at HLTH were well-known consumer brands such as Walmart, Google and 23andMe. Healthcare's internal debate on how far to go with consumerism was front and center at the conference.
Walmart, for instance, took attendees on a virtual tour of its new health clinic in Georgia, which was specifically designed using the retail giant's customer experience know-how to be a one-stop shop instead of the fragmented experience many patients face. CVS Health also spotlighted its new HealthHUB stores.
Google Health is looking to harness the company's massive reach as a search engine to meet patients where they are when they're searching online for health information.
Legacy health organizations, meanwhile, lag behind on the consumer experience versus the traditional patient experience. Whether they can keep up, and are willing to try, remains to be seen. — Paige Minemyer
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Clinicians Lament Invasions of Their Personal Privacy: Poll
Marcia Frellick
October 29, 2019
Top personal privacy concerns among healthcare providers differed in a Medscape poll by clinical role, age, and gender.
The top concern for physicians, for instance, is that patients would record their appointment conversations. The largest percentage of physicians overall (32%) chose that as the potential invasion of privacy that worried them most.
Fewer nurses were concerned about such recordings (18% ranked it first). Instead, their biggest concern was that a patient or family member would take an unauthorized photo of them and post it online. Almost one quarter of nurses and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) chose that potential violation among a list of possible worries.
That varied significantly by age. While 29% of nurses/APRNs ages 35 to 54 chose that as the top worry, only 12% of nurses 65 or older did.
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Payers turn to identity and access management to protect data
October 30, 2019, 3:47 p.m. EDT
Identity and access management solutions are playing a growing role in protecting against cyberattacks in the healthcare sector, experts say.
Martin Kuppinger, information and security expert with European-based KuppingerCole Analysts, says it’s time for healthcare organizations to take on Identity and access management (IAM) for security reasons. “Healthcare organizations deal with highly sensitive information,” he says in a recent white paper entitled, “IAM for Healthcare: It’s time to act.”
Healthcare organizations “face challenges in complying with ever-tightening regulations, combating ever increasing cyber risks and adapting to digital transformation,” Kuppinger says. “Comprehensive healthcare IAM, beyond pure SSO, helps healthcare organizations to better cope with these challenges.”
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HIT Think
Who’s responsible for patient data?
October 30, 2019, 3:42 p.m. EDT
In the wake of ongoing debate around the proposed rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to give patients better access to their data, here’s a discussion with Ashwini Zenooz, MD, senior vice president and general manager for healthcare and life sciences at Salesforce, and John Halamka, MD, executive director of the health technology exploration center of Beth Israel Lahey Health, on patient data and responsibility in the age of consumerism.
Back in February, CMS released The Interoperability and Patient Access Proposed Rule which, in part, called on the industry to take steps to give patients "safe, secure access to, and control over, their healthcare data.” It sparked outcries and hand-wringing despite sounding pretty reasonable on the surface. In a nutshell, what’s so controversial about this?
John Halamka: The main question for me is, “what’s the workflow?” Who is certifying apps that fit a hospital’s standards? It’s a massive customer relationship management challenge that no institution is even close to ready for. When my 80-year-old mom shows up asking for her data what’s the customer management involved? And is someone at the hospital going to be responsible for saying, “here’s how to choose an app, here’s what we recommend?” Hopefully the final rule out of CMS says something like
“you need to make the data flow to at least one app.” Something that at least makes it actionable and incrementally viable.
“you need to make the data flow to at least one app.” Something that at least makes it actionable and incrementally viable.
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Unstructured EHR data more useful for predictive analytics, study shows
Real-world evidence drawn from unstructured clinical notes was more accurate in algorithmic prediction of coronary artery disease than structured data, a new study from AMIA shows.
By Mike Miliard
October 30, 2019 10:15 AM
A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association has shown that real-world data contained in unstructured narratives has big predictive value when it comes to clinical research.
WHY IT MATTERS
While structured clinical notes in the electronic health record have obvious value, the research in JAMIA suggests that real-world data captured in unstructured notes offers more accuracy when trained algorithms are used to mine it.
While structured clinical notes in the electronic health record have obvious value, the research in JAMIA suggests that real-world data captured in unstructured notes offers more accuracy when trained algorithms are used to mine it.
While the challenges of making good use of unstructured data have been well-documented – and indeed, the researchers in this case depended on advanced artificial intelligence tools to mine it for insights – the details contained in these EHR narratives, with their real-world insights into patient history, conditions, procedures and more, were more useful in predicting coronary artery disease.
"With growing availability of digital health data and technology, health-related studies are increasingly augmented or implemented using real world data," wrote the researchers, led by Tina Hernandez-Boussard, associate professor of biomedical informatics, data science and surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine.
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Variances In Clinician EHR Use Can Hold Back Interoperability Efforts
October 30, 2019
Given that clinicians have different styles, it’s hardly surprising that they document care in different ways. Unfortunately, however, these idiosyncrasies are one of the obstacles that stand in the way of better interoperability, according to an article by Corepoint Health.
In a piece published in mHealth Intelligence, the vendor notes that one of the biggest obstacles to improved interoperability is variability in the way clinicians use EHRs.
The piece says that as things stand, clinician use of EHRs can vary not only from one organization to another but even between departments in the same hospital. Some examples of how these differences play out include the following:
- Health system usage standards: Often, hospitals and health systems struggle to share or aggregate patient data from outside of their walls because those institutions use different systems or have different naming conventions in place. These challenges are even harder to tackle when individual providers or even whole specialties use the EHR in a unique way.
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David Feinberg offers a peek behind the curtain at Google Health
Oct 28, 2019 9:27pm
LAS VEGAS—David Feinberg will admit that he's “not a tech guy.”
So how did Google, one of the world’s most famous tech giants, convince him to leave the provider world behind and take the helm of its healthcare work? The company proved it was serious about health and could make a serious impact, he said.
Feinberg, M.D., left his role as CEO of Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health System in November to join Google. He said Monday in a presentation at the HLTH conference that he felt confident that in his new role he could treat Google users like he would his own patients.
“Nine months into it, I'm actually certain that that is true and feel very confident what we’re providing is what I would want for my own patients or my own family,” he said.
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Period-Tracking Apps Say You May Have a Disorder. What if They’re Wrong?
· Oct. 27, 2019
Flo and Clue, two popular period-tracking apps, recently introduced health tools that evaluate a woman’s risk for the hormonal imbalance known as polycystic ovary syndrome.
In September alone, more than 636,000 women completed the Flo health assessments, said the app’s developer, Flo Health. The app then recommended that 240,000 of those women, or about 38 percent, ask their doctors about the hormonal disorder. (BioWink, the developer of Clue, declined to provide similar usage statistics.)
But what many women who used the Flo and Clue health tools may not have known is that the apps did not conduct high-level clinical studies to determine the accuracy of their health risk assessments or the potential for unintended consequences such as overdiagnosis. As a result, some experts said, the new tools could lead some women to be labeled with a hormonal imbalance they did not have or that may have no significant repercussions for their health.
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Is Googling your medical symptoms bad for your health?
How to avoid the spiral and find accurate health info that actually answers your questions.
October 28, 2019 6:00 AM PDT
Diagnosing yourself online is a slippery slope. You could Google "why do I have pain in my ribs" and come away with the possibility that you have a pinched nerve (possible) or fatal internal bleeding (unlikely, unless you've been impaled).
You should certainly know how to take care of yourself in the case of a common cold, migraine, or other relatively benign condition, and online health information can help you make the right decisions when you actually know what condition you have.
The problem is, the internet might make you think that a common cold is a bacterial infection (it's a virus, which won't respond to antibiotics), that a migraine is a brain tumor or an aneurysm and that an abdominal cramp is appendicitis.
In fact, research suggests that online symptom checkers are almost always wrong. So before you spiral down the symptom rabbit hole, learn why obsessively Googling symptoms is risky and how to look for accurate health information online.
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HIT Think
Why privacy and artificial intelligence still need some harmonization
October 28, 2019, 3:39 p.m. EDT
Headlines proclaiming the next great application of artificial intelligence appear with a great degree of frequency. As much that is true generally, healthcare seems to receive potentially an even greater amount of such announcements.
Determining the validity behind the assertions about artificial intelligence can be difficult. There will be truthful claims and others that do not live up to the hype. The arguably more interesting question is what artificial intelligence, including both the development and use, is doing to privacy.
Artificial intelligence systems require large volumes of data to be developed, trained and constantly refined. Where do the data come from? If talking about healthcare, the data must be about patients, which means sensitive, regulated information must be ingested, utilized and held. Given the use of healthcare information, HIPAA has the most obvious impact since, because HIPAA governs the use and disclosure of patient information.
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AI-powered ‘Doctor Google’ seen as the future of virtual triage
October 28, 2019, 11:31 p.m. EDT
As artificial intelligence applications continue to proliferate in medicine, healthcare technologists foresee—over the next few years—an AI-powered version of “Doctor Google” that will offer virtual triage capabilities.
“I’m a firm believer that, in five years, we’re going to be using Doctor Google for an awful lot of what we do day to day,” said Marc Probst, chief information officer at Intermountain Healthcare. “That’s because Doctor Google is going to know everything about me. It’s going to have access to my medical records and a massive amount of data about the different diseases and illnesses that are out there.”
“We actually couch it in the notion of a virtual assistant for a patient or consumer,” added fellow panelist Sara Vaezy, chief of digital strategy for Providence St. Joseph Health. “It can be as simple as an information retrieval engine that reveals if a medical service is covered by insurance, but it can be as complex as an actual personalized, predictive health companion.”
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Verma: CMS efforts have reduced provider burden to all-time low
October 29, 2019, 10:29 p.m. EDT
It’s been two years since the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched an effort to ensure providers spend less time on administrative tasks and more time with patients.
Now, CMS contends it has achieved unprecedented success in that aim.
In 2017, the agency launched its Patients Over Paperwork initiative in an attempt to improve the healthcare delivery system by reducing unnecessary burdens for clinicians.
“We have searched high and low for duplicative, unnecessary or excessively costly requirements,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma at an agency event on Tuesday highlighting its accomplishments over the past two years. “This effort was driven by the conviction that reams of prescriptive government regulations that dictate processes for the health system have failed.”
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Mastercard launches healthcare products aimed at cybersecurity, predictive analytics
by Tina Reed
Oct 27, 2019 4:30pm
LAS VEGAS—Mastercard is expanding the reach of its financial expertise—particularly when it comes to cybersecurity—into the healthcare industry.
The financial services company best known for its credit cards is launching Mastercard Healthcare Solutions, a collection of software products aimed at tackling perennial pain points in the business of healthcare, officials announced at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas on Sunday.
The new product suite—which will target both payers and providers, as well as technology platforms used by payers and providers—will include a host of data security offerings. This will include improved biometrics and behavioral analytics to protect health information against the ever-rising threat of data breaches.
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October 28, 2019 11:37 AM
Interoperability proposals could push HIEs toward new services
As HHS gears up to finalize long-awaited rules on interoperability and information-blocking, much of the industry has focused on their likelihood to spur development of new patient-facing apps. But the rules will also open new opportunities for some long-standing interoperability players: health information exchanges.
HIEs have been key players in facilitating healthcare interoperability to date, with about 70% of hospitals participating in at least one nationwide network, according to a data brief released late last year by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. eHealth Exchange, a nationwide health information network that was incubated as a federal program under the ONC in 2006, is one of those groups.
"I think they're giving HIEs a nice little nudge to mature faster," said Jay Nakashima, executive director of the eHealth Exchange.
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Facebook takes a first step into personal digital health with checkup reminder and screening tool
Oct 29, 2019 7:01pm
Tech giant Facebook launched a new feature to remind users to get health tests and screenings.
Facebook announced this week it is working with U.S. health organizations to offer a new preventive health tool that connects people to health resources and checkup reminders. The new feature will initially focus on cardiovascular health, cancer screening, and seasonal flu.
The resources available in the tool are provided by the American Cancer Society, the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to Freddy Abnousi, M.D., head of healthcare research at Facebook, in a blog post.
Tens of millions of people in the U.S. are missing out on recommended preventive care, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Abnousi, a cardiologist, said.
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Facebook expands into sharing age-related preventive health info
October 29, 2019, 3:30 p.m. EDT
Facebook is cracking the door open into another part of its users’ personal lives—their health.
The social media giant this week announced a feature that will use a person’s age and gender to provide preventive healthcare information, including suggested checkups. Users then will be able to find a nearby doctor or clinic, set a reminder for their appointment and mark it “done” after they’ve completed a visit—all while on Facebook.
The company says the feature is intended to encourage more people to take steps to prevent health issues. “I take care of patients every day who come in with acute heart attacks,” says Freddy Abnousi, MD, a practicing doctor who is head of healthcare research at Facebook. “Every time we bring someone back from the abyss, because that’s basically how they show up, we always wonder how we could have prevented some of this.”
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Medical scribes improve workflow in outpatient surgical setting
October 29, 2019, 10:16 p.m. EDT
The use of medical scribes had a positive impact on workflow in an outpatient surgical setting, increasing the number of patients seen and the level of resident involvement.
That’s among the findings from a pilot study presented this week at the 2019 American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress.
The study involved two attending surgeons at an outpatient surgical oncology practice at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California.
"While often employed by physicians in nonsurgical specialties, scribes are rarely seen in surgical outpatient clinics," observes lead author Sirivan Seng, MD, who is currently a resident physician at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland, Pa.
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Q&A: How Italy is working to digitise healthcare
An interview with Paolo Locatelli, scientific officer at the Politecnico Di Milano’s Digital Innovation in Healthcare Observatory in Italy.
October 23, 2019 10:13 AM
In a survey carried out by HIMSS Analytics in Europe last year, hospital IT executives reported grappling with many of the same challenges faced by players in other regions around the globe. From the lack of interoperability to ageing populations and issues in attracting and retaining top IT talent, common obstacles to digitisation were identified in most of the European countries polled.
Researchers also found a number of opportunities for providers to improve outcomes for their patients, streamline processes and ease pressures on their staff using digital technology and evidence-based innovations.
Paolo Locatelli, scientific officer at the Politecnico Di Milano’s Digital Innovation in Healthcare Observatory in Italy, has been in charge of research and innovation projects in European healthcare for the past 20 years.
At the beginning of November, he will be part of the committee helping to execute an event organised by the HIMSS Italian community in Rome, looking to support sharing of best practice.
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Telehealth: Consumers Just Don't Know About You! Lessons for Health Systems
By Mandy Roth | October 28, 2019
While consumers give virtual care high rankings, according to a study from J.D. Powers, lack of awareness presents a huge obstacle to success.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Those who've tried telehealth like it, with an overall score of 851 on a 1,000-point scale.
· 66% say they are not aware of telehealth services or it is not available to them.
· Word of mouth is key: positive recommendations from others led 65% of telehealth users to try the service
As more hospitals and health systems push forward with telehealth initiatives, a new consumer study from J.D. Power provides clues about how to provide these services more effectively to increase adoption. In short, telehealth programs need to increase awareness, expedite the enrollment process, and decrease the wait time before a consultation takes place.
Only 10% of healthcare consumers are using telehealth services, according to J.D. Power, which released the results of the study at HLTH, the healthcare innovation conference currently underway in Las Vegas. Industry experts agree that slow adoption rates present an obstacle to success. Earlier this year, Ann Mond Johnson, CEO of the telehealth association ATA, told HealthLeaders, "It's safe to say there's a lot of technology available, but the adoption engagement is really lacking."
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Why Technologists Fail to Think of Moderation as a Virtue and Other Stories About AI
OCTOBER 14, 2019
IT’S ALMOST A BANALITY nowadays to remark that artificial intelligence (AI) is so deeply embedded in our infrastructure that it’s affecting decisions everywhere. But what’s not trite is considering exactly how it will change markets, medicine, transportation, military operations, politics, social relations, criminal justice, and the likes of you and me — which will largely depend on big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the rest. If these behemoths continue to grow by supporting products and services that cause harm, then the most important stories we tell about AI won’t be about technology, but about capitalism incapacitating democratic governance. In other words: They will be about the private sector dictating the terms of innovation, including the direction of regulation. While the 25 contributors to Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI have lots of smart, multidisciplinary things to say about software and society, they mostly underplay or quickly move past the supersized consequences of supersized corporate ambitions. This is an unfortunate omission, and it would be a dangerous one in the policy context.
With so many authors, Possible Minds covers lots of ground. Its main themes revolve around zeitgeist-level concerns with how narrow AI (which performs well in discrete tasks) is shaping society now and how artificial general intelligence (which can learn across domains and think for itself) might shape it in the future. Broader themes dominate in part because the contributors have such varying research agendas. Some of them are physicists, computer scientists, and entrepreneurs, while others have expertise in fields like art history, psychology, and biology. What they have in common: Having enough accolades to be household names or near household names in their fields of expertise and sometimes beyond. This is presumably why the editor, conversation catalyst and controversial Edge creator John Brockman, invited them to contribute to this volume. They are his version of the great minds of the moment.
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Hospital ‘risk scores’ prioritize white patients
By Michael Price Oct. 24, 2019 , 2:05 PM
Set foot in any major U.S. hospital, and you are entering a place where computers assist doctors almost as much as nurses do. Some algorithms, for example, scan millions of records to flag high-risk patients for follow-up treatment. The problem is that these programs—also used by insurance companies—disproportionately direct their specialized care to white patients, a new study finds. The good news is that a relatively simple tweak may correct this racial bias—if the companies behind the algorithms are willing to do so.
Hospitals and insurance companies use algorithms to assign “risk scores” to more than 200 million Americans every year. The scores—derived from electronic health records that track illnesses, hospitalizations, and other variables—flag some high-risk patients for special interventions. If, for example, an algorithm determines that your diabetes, hypertension, and chronic kidney disease together are putting your life in danger, your primary care doctor might put you on an intensive program to lower your blood sugar.
In the new study, Ziad Obermeyer, a health policy researcher at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and colleagues examined the effectiveness of one such risk prediction program in a large research hospital. The team soon noticed that the Impact Pro program—manufactured by the health care company Optum in Eden Prairie, Minnesota—was giving many black patients “strangely low” risk scores, despite their deteriorating health conditions.
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Weekly News Recap
- Cerner’s Q3 revenue and earnings meet Wall Street expectations.
- Amazon will use the symptom checker and triage chatbox of just-acquired Health Navigator in its virtual clinic pilot.
- KLAS emphasizes physician EHR training to improve satisfaction.
- Viz.ai will use a new $50 million investment to expand the availability of its AI-powered stroke detection software.
- Recruitment and consulting firm Ettain Group acquires Leidos Health.
- Cleveland Clinic will expand its relationship with American Well to include a new digital health company, The Clinic, that will offer patients access to Cleveland Clinic providers through American Well’s technology.
- Cerner acquires healthcare security-focused government IT contractor AbleVets.
- England’s NHS gives Google access to five years’ of patient data from several hospitals despite the privacy concerns of critics.
- Google hires former National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH (Dell Medical School) to the newly created position of chief health officer.
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Enjoy!
David.
