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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https://mhealthintelligence.com/news/video-visit-use-less-likely-among-non-white-older-americans
HHS: Video Visit Use Less Likely Among Non-White, Older Americans
A new federal report shows that those who had higher overall rates of telehealth use, like older and non-White individuals, tended to use audio-only telehealth more than their counterparts.
By Anuja Vaidya
February 04, 2022 - The highest rates of telehealth visits were among those with government-sponsored insurance, Black individuals, and those older than 65, according to a new federal report. These groups also had higher proportions of audio-only visits as compared to their counterparts.
Released by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, which advises the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, the report is based on an analysis of the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey conducted weekly. Researchers used survey data from April 14 to Oct. 11, 2021, to assess overall rates of telehealth use.
A total of 808,368 adults across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., responded to the survey.
About 670,155 adults answered the question on telehealth use, of which 23.1 percent reported having used virtual visit services within the previous four weeks. Among adults with a child in the house, 19.7 percent said that the child had used telehealth services in the prior month.
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https://www.digitalhealth.net/2022/02/10-year-national-plan-cancer-ai/
10-year national plan to tackle cancer features increased use of AI
The UK government has unveiled a 10-year national plan to tackle cancer which includes an increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
Hanna Crouch 4 Feb 2022
In a speech later today, health secretary, Sajid Javid will be setting out his plans on how to make England a world-leader in cancer care.
According to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), a key element of the decade-long plan will be building on the latest scientific advances and partnering with the “country’s technology pioneers”.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, for example, have the potential to help the health service radically improve its assessment of cancer risk,” a release by DHSC states.
In his speech, Javid is expected to “declare a national war on cancer”.
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https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/01/31/identity-attacks/
Tony Cole, CTO, Attivo Networks
January 31, 2022
Reducing the blast radius of credential theft
Cybersecurity has come to be defined by identity, with almost every attack today revolving around gaining control of a user’s identity as a means of accessing critical data and systems. Verizon’s latest data breach report found that credentials are the most sought-after form of data.
As we have repeatedly seen, a single set of compromised credentials can be enough to infiltrate an organization and drop a virtual bomb in its network.
The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack was made possible with just one set of credentials. More recently, the ransomware and data theft attack on Planned Parenthood also seems to have started with a compromised account.
So how can enterprises limit the blast radius of a stolen identity?
Why AD is the key to identity attacks
Aside from unsophisticated “smash and grab” style data thefts and ransomware attacks, the initial credential theft is only the beginning. Cybercriminals seek to escalate their privileges before executing their attack so that they can maximize the impact and potential spoils.
Most firms now employ strategies like identity access management (IAM) and privileged access management (PAM) to authenticate user identities. But they must also look beyond this to protect the very mechanisms that govern identification.
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HHS: Disparities in video telehealth use highlight key barriers to access
By Robert King
Feb 3, 2022 07:30am
While telehealth use exploded during the pandemic, a new federal study found massive income disparities in video versus audio services.
Department of Health and Human Services’ Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) released a survey Tuesday (PDF) on telehealth use rates from April to October of last year. The report urged more equitable access to telehealth so that disparities don’t become permanent.
The survey of 808,368 U.S. adults found that 1 in 4 respondents used telehealth over the previous month.
Overall, telehealth usage from April to October was below rates from 2020 at the onset of the pandemic but still far above pre-pandemic levels.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/cerner-previews-its-new-products-and-plans-himss22
Cerner previews its new products and plans for HIMSS22
The company plans to highlight more FHIR-enabled interoperability, organ donor and recipient matching tools, and new approaches to simplifying public health data reporting in Orlando next month.
By Bill Siwicki
February 04, 2022 11:13 AM
While electronic health record giant Cerner has been in the spotlight of late because of its pending acquisition by Oracle, that is not what the health IT company will be highlighting in the exhibit hall of the upcoming HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition in Orlando, March 14-18.
Interoperability, organ donation technologies, public health reporting of infectious diseases, the caregiver experience, care coordination and risk arrangements, and data usability – these are the subjects and technologies that Cerner will emphasize at HIMSS22, according to Sam Lambson, vice president of interoperability at Cerner.
Healthcare IT News interviewed Lambson to get an advance look at what Cerner will be up to at healthcare information technology's biggest gathering.
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3 Digital Health Strategies to Address the Patient Language Barrier
Analysis | By Eric Wicklund | February 04, 2022
Faced with a surge in virtual visits and a growing population of limited English proficiency (LEP) patients, clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital developed a three-pronged approach to tackling the language barrier and improving acces to care for underserved populations.
Healthcare organizations may see virtual care as the key to helping underserved populations access care, but things don’t work so well if those patients have problems understanding English.
With a surge in virtual care caused by the pandemic and a growing population of limited English proficiency (LEP) patients, clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital launched new protocols to make sure the Boston-based health center was reaching people who needed to be reached. The developed three specific strategies aimed at tackling what could be a considerable barrier to care.
“With an increased reliance on virtual care for health care during the pandemic, it’s important to make sure we are not increasing disparities for patients who have language barriers,” Aswita Tan-McGrory, MBA, MSPH, director of the Disparities Solutions Center and administrative director of the Mongan Institute at MGH, said in a press release. “Also, addressing challenges with these three strategies will actually increase care and access for all patients.”
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/industry-applauds-as-biden-reboots-cancer-moonshot
Industry Applauds as Biden Reboots Cancer Moonshot
With improvements in cancer prevention, screenings, and research, the reignition of the Cancer Moonshot aims to “end cancer as we know it today,” the president said.
February 03, 2022 - Almost six years to the day after the Cancer Moonshot Task Force met for the first time, President Joe Biden announced the reignition of the initiative, aiming to reduce the cancer death rate by 50 percent in the next 25 years by bolstering prevention, screening, and research.
In January 2016, then-President Barack Obama tapped Vice President Biden to lead a “moonshot” to end cancer as we know it. In the following weeks, President Obama signed a presidential memorandum creating the first White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force.
In June of the same year, the vice president convened almost 400 cancer researchers, oncologists, nurses, patients, advocates, and others at Howard University in Washington, DC.
According to the Obama Administration archives, “This marked the first time that individuals and organizations spanning the entire cancer community and beyond convened under the national charge of doubling the rate of progress toward a cure and making a decade worth of advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment in five years.”
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Will TEFCA shove health information exchange forward?
After decades of inertia, there are finally signs of progress, as fed agencies push the pile. But questions surround whether hurdles will be overcome.
Feb 03 2022
The recently announced final version of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement could be one of the most consequential steps of the past decade to enable the easy exchange of healthcare information. Or not.
Some great minds have been digging deep into TEFCA’s potential impact. There are worries about the details, questions about regulatory overreach or duplication, and Groundhog Day inferences that we’ve seen this all happen before, albeit in slightly different trappings, with progress proving to be elusive.
TEFCA is complicated in structure and encumbered by a salad bar full of acronyms (because it’s healthcare, after all). As one person on Twitter noted, “Why does it have to be so complicated?”
There are three important TEFCA questions to consider: Why is it here? What is it trying to do? And what are its chances of success?
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https://healthitsecurity.com/news/gao-seeks-feedback-on-healthcare-data-breach-reporting
GAO Seeks Feedback on Healthcare Data Breach Reporting
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is seeking feedback from HIPAA-covered entities on the healthcare data breach reporting process.
By Jill McKeon
February 02, 2022 - The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is asking HIPAA-covered entities for feedback on the healthcare data breach reporting process. The rapid response survey is available via SurveyMonkey and responses will be collected until 4 pm ET on Friday, February 4.
GAO enlisted the help of the American Hospital Association (AHA), Health-ISAC, and the Health Sector Coordinating Council (HSCC) to distribute the survey.
The survey stems from Congress’ request that GAO review the number of data breaches that covered entities have reported to HHS since 2015.
“In part, GAO is seeking to answer what challenges related to HHS’s data breach reporting requirements, if any, have covered entities reported and what efforts has HHS taken to address them,” the survey introduction stated.
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HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey: Some improvements, but still a 'long way to go'
As risk levels increase, health systems have "significant challenges to overcome," according to the 13th annual report – including suboptimal security spending, vulnerable legacy tech and weak-link human factors.
By Mike Miliard
February 03, 2022 09:41 AM
The 2021 HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey was published this week. It shows an industry that's grappling with an ever more complex attack surface and relentless adversaries – but largely still limited by inadequate security budgets and defense strategies that are too often reactive instead of proactive.
WHY IT
MATTERS
The findings of the 2021 survey, which was sponsored by Carahsoft, do show
some progress. HIMSS (the parent company of Healthcare IT News) polled 167 healthcare
cybersecurity professionals for the 13th annual report and found that a
majority of respondents (59%) reported an increase in cybersecurity budgets in
2021 when compared to 2020.
But "myriad of challenges, including tight budgets, aging infrastructure and an increase in social engineering and ransomware attacks," remain, the report shows. In fact, 67% percent of poll respondents reported that their healthcare organizations experienced "significant security incidents" in the past 12 months, according to HIMSS.
That makes the fact that 34% of healthcare organizations' security budgets "did not substantially change" in the face of increased threats – or, worse, that 6% of respondents said their cyber spending actually decreased – that much more discouraging.
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Smoke Still Rising Over the Cybersecurity Battlefield of 2021
February 3, 2022
When my colleague John Lynn sent the following report over to me, he seemed quite taken aback by the results, calling the number of organizations reporting a large breach “crazy.” After a year like 2021, it’s hard to argue with his assessment. This volume and ferocity of cybersecurity attacks on healthcare organizations have been brutal.
The top-line finding of Fortified Health Security’s 2022 Horizon Report was that in 2021, over 700 healthcare organizations reported a breach of 500 or more patient records to the HHS Office for Civil Rights. Yes, you read that right. That’s almost double the number of attacks reported five years earlier.
Attacks on healthcare providers accounted for the overwhelming number of breaches, making up 72% of all incidents. Just 15% of breaches were reported by health plans and 13% by business associates. (A tiny fraction of breaches were reported by healthcare clearinghouses.)
Taken together, these breaches affected 45 million patients in the US, up from 34 million in 2020. This was the highest number of individuals affected in a single year, other than in 2015 when Anthem Inc. and Premera Blue Cross saw breaches that affected 9 million individuals.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/gao-calls-on-va-to-address-ehrm-health-data-management-issues
GAO Calls on VA to Address EHRM Health Data Management Issues
The GAO report outlines several health data management issues with VA’s EHRM project, including poor migrated data quality.
February 02, 2022 - The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) needs to address health data management challenges for its EHR modernization (EHRM) project, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that raises patient safety concerns related to data quality.
VA’s planned data management activities for its EHR implementation included migrating legacy data to the new Cerner system. Consistent with its plans, VA migrated selected data to the new EHR platform in October 2020 prior to the initial system deployment.
While VA conducted testing to help ensure migrated data were accurate and matched expected results, VA’s analyses and GAO’s report indicate that clinicians experienced challenges with the quality of migrated data.
Clinicians reported challenges with data accessibility, accuracy, and appropriateness, in particular.
For instance, VA issued a report after the initial deployment that identified patient safety risks in the new system related to incomplete data migration.
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Telehealth Maintained Care Quality for Type 2 Diabetics During Pandemic
Patients who used telehealth during the pandemic for type 2 diabetes care were just as likely to achieve quality measures as patients who received in-person care before the pandemic, a study found.
February 01, 2022 - Using telehealth for type 2 diabetes care during the COVID-19 pandemic helped maintain quality of care and led to better health outcomes for patients, compared to those who only utilized in-person care, a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found.
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) gathered data from the EHR for patients at a single academic medical center who had type 2 diabetes.
To understand how telehealth impacted the quality of diabetes care during the pandemic, the researchers analyzed patient data from before and during the pandemic. The pandemic period consisted of the first nine months of the public health emergency, starting on March 19, 2020.
Care quality was determined by whether or not patients met a series of composite measures, including a systolic/diastolic blood pressure less than 140/90 mmHg, hemoglobin A1c less than 8 percent, an active prescription for statins, aspirin, or other anti-platelet agents, and a non-user of tobacco or someone who quit during the study period.
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https://healthitsecurity.com/news/gao-seeks-feedback-on-healthcare-data-breach-reporting
GAO Seeks Feedback on Healthcare Data Breach Reporting
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is seeking feedback from HIPAA-covered entities on the healthcare data breach reporting process.
By Jill McKeon
February 02, 2022 - The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is asking HIPAA-covered entities for feedback on the healthcare data breach reporting process. The rapid response survey is available via SurveyMonkey and responses will be collected until 4 pm ET on Friday, February 4.
GAO enlisted the help of the American Hospital Association (AHA), Health-ISAC, and the Health Sector Coordinating Council (HSCC) to distribute the survey.
The survey stems from Congress’ request that GAO review the number of data breaches that covered entities have reported to HHS since 2015.
“In part, GAO is seeking to answer what challenges related to HHS’s data breach reporting requirements, if any, have covered entities reported and what efforts has HHS taken to address them,” the survey introduction stated.
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The Necessary Rise of Africa's Health Tech
The African health-care sector continues to struggle with a lack of resources and funding, but creative uses of technology offer new possibilities for improving access to medical treatment. Building on developments spurred by the pandemic, health tech on the continent is poised for explosive growth.
NAIROBI – Africa’s health systems suffer from serious inefficiencies. Countries across the continent struggle with disruptions in medical equipment and drug supply chains, last-mile health-services delivery, medical data analysis and storage, and financing. But innovations in telemedicine, drones, big data analytics, wearables, and information management have brought the possibility of effective, affordable solutions into view, promising to improve overall health outcomes.
In recent years, African health tech has recorded impressive growth. More than 40 health-tech start-ups on the continent received series A funding in 2020 alone. Recently launched firms cover a range of health-related fields, including genetic sequencing, drug procurement, and health literacy. The growth opportunities are enormous. But for health-tech companies to thrive, entrepreneurs must study past successes and failures to determine what works and what does not in the African context. Wisepill, established in 2007, is one of African health tech’s earliest success stories. The South African company developed a storage container that alerts users via their mobile device when they forget to take their medication. It also notifies doctors or researchers when a pill is taken. Multiple studies in South Africa and Uganda showed that Wisepill improved rates of adherence to medication regimens to more than 90%. Wisepill succeeded because it stayed focused on the problem it wanted to solve. The story of Meditell, a Nigerian health-tech start-up that also hoped to improve medication compliance, is a more cautionary tale. Meditell’s founders developed software that would send text messages from hospitals to patients to remind them to take their medicine. To attract interest in the product, the founders engaged in complex negotiations with insurance systems and pharmaceutical companies. As Meditell tried to modify its product to meet demands from these potential clients, it moved further away from its initial goal and ultimately failed. But it is possible for African health-tech firms to scale up if they start small, grow slowly, and respond to the clients they have. District Health Information Software (DHIS), which manages health data, began recording patient information on its platform in three small districts in South Africa. As interest in the platform grew, DHIS programmers worked to expand its features and improve its usability in different contexts. Today, the platform has been adopted in 73 countries.
African health-tech entrepreneurs have demonstrated an impressive talent for making the most of the resources available to them. Internet connectivity was not widespread in the mid-2000s, when the founders of Frontline SMS wanted to improve communication between community health workers and hospital staff. Adapting to infrastructure constraints, they developed a program to pass information via simple text-message technology, which also could be used to send images of blood samples taken with a basic camera phone, thereby allowing patients to be diagnosed without going to a clinic.
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https://fortune.com/2022/01/31/scammers-government-covid-website-cybersecurity-domain-names/
Scammers are registering fake COVID related government websites
By Jeff Stone and Bloomberg
February 1, 2022 2:37 AM GMT+11
As a new government website went live in January to offer free COVID-19 test kits, a rash of new domain names were registered. Some had remarkably similar URLs, or were nearly the same but slightly misspelled.
Cybersecurity experts said the goal was likely the same for all of them: bogus domain names that can be used for phishing attacks and other scams.
Suspected fraudsters have registered more than 600 suspicious domain registrations since Jan. 15, around the time Biden administration announced details about a program in which the U.S. Postal Service would deliver COVID-19 tests to Americans’ homes, email security firm Proofpoint Inc. told Bloomberg News. The look-alike URLs are often meant to trick COVID-weary Americans into thinking they are signing up for a free nasal swab, when in fact they might be handing personal data over to a cybercrime syndicate, cybersecurity experts said.
The government website for free COVID tests, covidtests.gov, opened for business on Jan. 18, along with a related site, special.usps.com, where users are directed to place an order with the Postal Service.
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https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/02/whats-next-for-digital-mental-health-companies/
What’s next for digital mental health companies?
By Feb. 2, 2022
Digital mental health start-ups may be looking like big tech companies — consider the $5.1 billion in venture capital investment in 2021 — but is their economic value matched by their impact and clinical value?
It’s an inconvenient question with a short answer: It’s too early to tell.
There’s no question that the most successful companies are disrupting the delivery of mental health care by offering access and convenience. And why not? Unlike medical or surgical specialties built around procedures, most mental health care involves assessment by an interview and treatment with medication and psychotherapy. Every part of this can be done remotely, with quicker response times and greater convenience than available in traditional office-based practices.
It’s no surprise, then, that a start-up like Cerebral (disclosure: I am a scientific advisor for this company), which launched with remote medication and therapy less than two years ago, is already one of the largest providers of mental health care in the nation.
But digital mental health is still in its first chapter: transferring the same care from office to internet to improve access and convenience. If digital mental health is to truly transform care, its next chapter needs to focus on improving outcomes. How will that happen? Here are a few ideas that have emerged from my six years spent straddling the worlds of technology and mental health care.
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FHIR API Interoperability Relies on Standardized Endpoint Publication
ONC officials noted that FHIR API interoperability requires health IT developers to publish FHIR endpoints in a standardized format.
February 01, 2022 - Interoperability of Health Level Seven (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) application programming interfaces (APIs) requires health IT developers to publish FHIR endpoints, according to a HealthITBuzz blog post written by ONC officials Wes Barker, Vaishali Patel, and Jeff Smith.
The ONC 21st Century Cures Act Final Rule requires certain developers of certified health IT to provide their customer base with a certified FHIR API to support patient access to health information by December 31, 2022.
ONC officials noted that to ensure patients can access these certified APIs “without special effort,” the Cures Rule API Conditions and Maintenance of Certification requires that certified health IT developers publish “service base URLs” or “endpoints” for all customers in a machine-readable format at no charge.
“These electronic endpoints are the specific locations on the internet that make it possible for an app to know where to go to access health information on behalf of the users,” Barker, Patel, and Smith wrote.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/onc-expects-to-open-tefca-interoperability-network-applications-q2
ONC Expects to Open TEFCA Interoperability Network Applications Q2
Officials projected that ONC will begin accepting QHIN applications for the TEFCA interoperability framework during Q2.
February 01, 2022 - ONC and its Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE), The Sequoia Project, Inc., recently announced the publication of the Trusted Exchange Framework and the Common Agreement (TEFCA) interoperability framework.
The Trusted Exchange Framework is a set of non-binding but foundational health information exchange (HIE) principles, while The Common Agreement establishes the technical infrastructure and governing approach to support data exchange.
Ultimately, ONC intends for TEFCA to connect Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs) to one another to support health information exchange nationwide. QHINS will sign contracts with the RCE to agree on policy and technical terms to enable data exchange across networks.
“We want to create a uniform for interoperability so that every authorized user, including individuals, have a baseline expectation of being able to get basic medical record information securely and reliably across the network, regardless of where they are geographically or which vendor or technology they're using,” Mickey Tripathi, national coordinator for health IT, said in a recent press briefing.
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/viewpoint-pandemic-promise-of-machine-learning-falls-short
Viewpoint: Pandemic Promise of Machine Learning Falls Short
Northwestern University researchers examined machine learning practices and uses during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that techniques need to be reevaluated.
January 31, 2022 - With the recent advances in machine learning algorithms, healthcare professionals had high expectations for the technology during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, according to an analysis published by a Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine research team, these expectations have been mostly unrealized except for a few notable successes. In their viewpoint analysis, the researchers reflected on the underlying reasons to shift the approach from reactive to proactive machine learning, which involves the use of algorithms and statistics to identify patterns in data, to better utilize the technology.
Throughout the pandemic, hundreds of image-based machine learning models have been developed. However, very few models have achieved widespread clinical use for COVID-19 detection and forecasting due to data bias, data shift, and ethological limitations.
According to the research team, one significant success of machine learning during the pandemic involved the use of reinforcement learning to create more effective COVID-19 testing for travelers
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Telehealth Maintained Care Quality for Type 2 Diabetics During Pandemic
Patients who used telehealth during the pandemic for type 2 diabetes care were just as likely to achieve quality measures as patients who received in-person care before the pandemic, a study found.
February 01, 2022 - Using telehealth for type 2 diabetes care during the COVID-19 pandemic helped maintain quality of care and led to better health outcomes for patients, compared to those who only utilized in-person care, a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found.
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) gathered data from the EHR for patients at a single academic medical center who had type 2 diabetes.
To understand how telehealth impacted the quality of diabetes care during the pandemic, the researchers analyzed patient data from before and during the pandemic. The pandemic period consisted of the first nine months of the public health emergency, starting on March 19, 2020.
Care quality was determined by whether or not patients met a series of composite measures, including a systolic/diastolic blood pressure less than 140/90 mmHg, hemoglobin A1c less than 8 percent, an active prescription for statins, aspirin, or other anti-platelet agents, and a non-user of tobacco or someone who quit during the study period.
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Budget restraints, aging infrastructure loom as security risks
A just-released HIMSS survey shows organizations are trying to do more to face down phishing attacks and ransomware gambits.
Feb 01 2022
Cybersecurity professionals in healthcare continue to face a steady onslaught of cyberattacks from the outside, but organizations appear to be increasingly vulnerable as computing platforms age and security budgets remain stagnant.
Those are among the findings from the 2021 HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey Report, which offered some challenges for security at the nation’s healthcare organizations.
Security budget restraints at some organizations and aging infrastructures come even as threats are rising for attacks across multiple industry sectors, including healthcare. Late in January, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) urged organizations to protect against attacks and watch for malicious cyber activity.
While most threats in healthcare still appear to initially come from phishing or human error, the HIMSS survey indicates, about half of respondents reported that security budgets were even or down in 2021 when compared with 2020, and about 38 percent expected security budgets to remain the same (35 percent) or decline (3 percent).
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Positives outweigh concerns as shift to the cloud continues
More healthcare organizations are looking to cloud strategies to achieve efficiencies, with IT executives aiming to make wise choices.
Feb 01 2022
Healthcare organizations are engaging in an inexorable shift to the cloud – past reticence to surrender control of key patient and business information has given way to strategic moves to take advantage of the cloud’s benefits.
More organizations are looking to move more of their operations to the cloud, but still wrestle with data security concerns and worries about sufficient uptime.
Data tells the
story
A 2018 survey by HIMSS Analytics predicted that the majority of electronic
medical records would be cloud-hosted at the beginning of this decade, and that
prediction appears to be borne out in other barometers of cloud use within the
healthcare industry.
According to an online survey conducted last July by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), 82 percent of health IT executives said their organizations are relying on the cloud in some way. Nearly 10 percent said they are “all in” on the public cloud, while 60 percent are migrating to the cloud by adopting a hybrid approach, with part of their data in the cloud and part still maintained on premise.
The global market for healthcare cloud computing is predicted to grow at a rate of 18.7 percent, hitting a projected $76.8 billion by 2026, predicts a study by ResearchandMarkets.com.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/emea/care-anywhere-new-normal-according-new-industry-report
‘Care Anywhere’ is the new normal, according to new industry report
Innovation predictions concern growing demand for virtual mental health, femtech and more AI scrutiny.
By Anna Engberg
February 01, 2022 09:33 AM
Today, BCG Digital Ventures (BCGDV), a subsidiary of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), has released a new report that sheds light on predicted healthcare innovations for 2022.
With virtual mental health a trend during the exponential growth of remote care, AI and femtech, the survey focuses on three key areas that might increasingly shape future medical care.
WHY IT MATTERS
The annually published report is a qualitative study that collects predictions from 14 global healthcare experts within the BCG Digital Ventures network.
“They represent a broad range of disciplines at Digital Ventures – from product, strategic design to engineering. Before joining BCGDV, they practised as medical doctors or worked in industries such as health insurance, medtech or pharma”, the company spokesperson informed Healthcare IT News.
BCGDV predicts that the ‘new normal’ of remote and hybrid working models, which have increased throughout the pandemic, will deeply impact future health care provision. Many of the newly launched tools, solutions, platforms and business models in the digital field will persist and grow, according to the forecast.
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'Incredible efforts': HIMSS announces first healthcare centre to be recognised for its digital transformation in India
Karuna Trust's Tavarekere Urban Primary Health Center has achieved Stage 6 of the HIMSS O-EMRAM.
By Lynne Minion
January 30, 2022 08:26 PM
India’s Karuna Trust has achieved a digital health milestone, becoming the first healthcare provider in the nation to achieve HIMSS O-EMRAM Stage 6 for the technology integrations at its Tavarekere Urban Primary Health Center in Bengaluru.
WHY IT MATTERS
Karuna Trust joins a group of organisations across the globe that are committed to operating in a near paperless environment while using electronic patient record technology to drive improvements in all aspects of ambulatory care.
Congratulating Karuna Trust on its "incredible efforts", HIMSS Regional Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa John Rayner, said the outcome was the result of the "hard work and dedication" of the clinical team, who worked alongside colleagues from EMR provider Cerner to complete the Outpatient Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model assessment.
"On being validated at Stage 6 you are clearly demonstrating your ongoing commitment to improving patient safety and the overall quality of clinical care through the effective use and deployment of electronic medical record technology," Rayner said.
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https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2022/02/01/final-2022-health-it-predictions/
Final 2022 Health IT Predictions
February 1, 2022
As we wrap up our 2022 health IT predictions, we’ve got a potpourri of predictions for you to enjoy. In case you missed our topic specific predictions, you can find all of those Health IT Predictions here. It will be fun to look back at all of these predictions at the end of 2022 and see where we’re at.
This final list of predictions is particularly interesting because it spans such a wide range of topics and categories. It illustrates how many moving parts there are in healthcare IT and how many opportunities there are to make a difference in a healthcare organization. Plus, it also highlights how many outside forces impact healthcare as well.
Here’s a look at some of the 2022 predictions from across a wide spectrum of health IT topics:
Anja
Maciagiewicz, Manager, Marketing Planning at LexisNexis Risk Solutions
Continued
Patient Fallout Leading to an Uptick in Quick-Service Options
In 2022, we are going to continue to see the fallout of patients skimping on
their healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. At LexisNexis Risk Solutions, we
have already been able to track how the lack of cancer screenings have led to a
significant decrease in the number of diagnosed cancer patients -spurring the
concern that patients will receive diagnosis at a later stage, making it more
difficult to treat and overcome. We’ll start seeing evidence of more advanced
chronic conditions and difficult to treat diseases that have a correlation to
the (hopefully temporary) lack of medical care.
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How Digital Health Lays the Groundwork for Future Healthcare Strategy
Analysis | By Eric Wicklund | February 01, 2022
Baptist Health in Arkansas is adapting digital health tools and platforms to improve inpatient care, a pathway that may change how hospitals of the future do their business.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Healthcare organizations are integrating in-person and virtual care to better meet patient needs and expectations and reduce traffic in hospitals
- This will change how hospitals are used in the future, with a strategy to treat more patients at home and save inpatient care for the sickest patients
- With that in mind, health systems are using new digital health tools and platforms and eyeing new strategies that improve workloads and bedside care, and deliver better data to the care team no matter where they are located
Virtual care technology is giving health system administrators new ideas on how to deliver care inside the hospital.
Baptist Health is one of many health systems using digital health to improve its ICU services and connect care providers throughout the Arkansas-based 11-hospital network, improving care at the bedside and enabling small, rural hospitals to reduce transfers and care for more patients. Executives say the platform, which has been in use for roughly 14 years, allows them to coordinate care from the main hospitals in Little Rock and give outlying hospitals with fewer resources the support they need.
"We're improving care at the bedside," says Kourtney Matlock, corporate vice president of population health. "We can expand our specialists' reach beyond our Little Rock locations and help [rural sites] keep more of their patients."
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Teladoc is on the verge of replacing Tesla as Ark Invest's biggest holding. Here's why Cathie Wood is so bullish on the telemedicine company.
Feb 1, 2022, 5:50 AM
- Teladoc is neck and neck with Tesla as Ark Invest's top holding across all of its funds.
- Cathie Wood has been consistently trimming Ark Invest's Tesla stake while buying more Teladoc.
- Here's why she is so bullish on the telemedicine company that lost 54% in 2021.
Despite a more than 50% decline in 2021, Teladoc has quietly risen to be Ark Invest's second largest holding across all of its funds — and it is on the verge of replacing Tesla for the top spot.
As of Friday, its Teladoc position was worth $1.24 billion, while its Tesla position was worth $1.25 billion, according to the latest data from Cathie Wood's Ark. Depending on how Monday shakes out, Teladoc could finally knock Tesla off the top spot in Ark's investment portfolio.
Teladoc was first added to Ark's flagship Disruptive Innovation and Genomic Revolution ETFs in September 2020, with a 2% weight across all of Ark's combined ETF funds. Since then, Ark has consistently added to the position, with Teladoc having a 5.7% weighting today.
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https://ehrintelligence.com/news/stigmatizing-language-in-ehr-notes-reveals-implicit-bias-concerns
Stigmatizing Language in EHR Notes Reveals Implicit Bias Concerns
EHR notes about Black patients were 67 percent more likely to contain stigmatizing language compared to notes about White patients.
January 31, 2022 - EHR notes of Black patients were more likely to contain stigmatizing language compared to those of White patients, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open that raises concerns for implicit bias in clinical documentation and its potential to exacerbate racial health disparities.
Researchers used natural language processing to analyze EHR admission notes for 29,783 patients at a large, urban academic medical center.
Clinicians used stigmatizing language about diabetes, substance use disorder, or chronic pain in one of 40 hospital admission notes.
The study authors defined stigmatizing words and phrases based on the current literature for each condition.
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/viewpoint-pandemic-promise-of-machine-learning-falls-short
Viewpoint: Pandemic Promise of Machine Learning Falls Short
Northwestern University researchers examined machine learning practices and uses during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that techniques need to be reevaluated.
January 31, 2022 - With the recent advances in machine learning algorithms, healthcare professionals had high expectations for the technology during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, according to an analysis published by a Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine research team, these expectations have been mostly unrealized except for a few notable successes. In their viewpoint analysis, the researchers reflected on the underlying reasons to shift the approach from reactive to proactive machine learning, which involves the use of algorithms and statistics to identify patterns in data, to better utilize the technology.
Throughout the pandemic, hundreds of image-based machine learning models have been developed. However, very few models have achieved widespread clinical use for COVID-19 detection and forecasting due to data bias, data shift, and ethological limitations.
According to the research team, one significant success of machine learning during the pandemic involved the use of reinforcement learning to create more effective COVID-19 testing for travelers entering Greece.
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DHS Warns of Potential Russian Cyberattacks on Critical Infrastructure
As tensions mount between the US, Russia, and Ukraine, DHS warned of potential Russian cyberattacks against US critical infrastructure.
By Jill McKeon
January 28, 2022 - As the US grapples with tensions between Russia and Ukraine, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned of the potential for Russian cyberattacks on US critical infrastructure, according to a DHS memo obtained by CNN.
“Russia maintains a range of offensive cyber tools that it could employ against US networks—from low-level denials-of-service to destructive attacks targeting critical infrastructure," the January 23 memo stated.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA) issued a joint advisory in early January warning critical infrastructure entities to remain vigilant against Russian state-sponsored cyberattacks.
Healthcare organizations could become collateral damage of Russian-deployed malware, John Riggi, national advisor for cybersecurity and risk at the American Hospital Association (AHA) cautioned in an AHA notice in response to the advisory.
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https://histalk2.com/2022/01/28/larry-weed-internal-medicine-grand-rounds-transcript-1971/
Larry Weed Internal Medicine Grand Rounds Transcript – 1971
January 28, 2022 News
I was so moved by this remarkable presentation that I took several hours to transcribe it. The presentation – delivered without notes by Larry Weed, MD at Emory University’s medical grand rounds in 1971 while referring to a chart he borrowed from its clinic– is as valid now, maybe more so, than it was 50-plus years ago. Thanks to VisualDx and its CEO Art Papier, MD, who was a medical student of Weed’s, for posting the video on YouTube.
Lawrence Weed, MD was a professor of medicine and pharmacology at Yale in the 1950s when he developed the concept of the problem-oriented medical record and the universally used SOAP note (subjective, objective, assessment, plan) for documenting patient care, which he incorporated into an electronic system. His dry humor comes through as he addressed his white-coated audience in Atlanta, much as it did in a JAMIA oral history where he described telling a surgeon who bristled at the idea of a computer adding value to his experience and intuition, “I’m not saying that you don’t have intuitive feelings. What I’m suggesting is that they may be worthless.”
Larry Weed died in 2017 at 93.
This is a long transcript of the nearly hour-long presentation, but I guarantee it’s worth reading.
It’s good for me to be here. I don’t know whether when I’m done you’ll think it’s good that I was here. But I can be a real hit-and-run driver. I don’t have to stay here, and if I’m lucky, I won’t get sick in Atlanta, because once you antagonize somebody and then you get sick in front of them, you’re never quite sure whether you’re safe or not. But from what TV says, you shouldn’t get sick in America anyway.
What I’d like to do is go at this problem, not from the point of view of the record. We really aren’t taking care of records — we take care of people. We’re trying to get across the idea that this record cannot be separated from the caring of that patient. This is not the practice of medicine over here and and the record over here. This is the practice of medicine. It’s intertwined with it. It determines what you do in the long run. You’re a victim of it, or you’re a triumph because of it. The human mind simply cannot carry all the information about all the patients in the practice without error. And so the record becomes part of your practice.
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https://hbr.org/2021/12/electronic-health-records-can-improve-the-organ-donation-process
Electronic Health Records Can Improve the Organ Donation Process
by Alexandra K. Glazier, Mathew Moss, and Lindsay A. Martin
December 13, 2021
In the last decade, the dark side of electronic health records (EHR) systems has received the most attention: how their complexity and time-consuming demands have added to physicians’ and nurses’ workloads, contributing to burnout. But in recent years, we have begun to see more and more provider organizations harness the EHR’s potential to improve care and reduce its time and costs. An initiative conducted by New England Donor Services (NEDS) and Yale New Haven Health to streamline the process for identifying potential organ donors for patients needing transplants is one of the latest examples. It offers practical insights for other organizations that are seeking to tap the power of EHRs to perform other functions and, if they are having to contend with multiple EHRs that aren’t completely compatible, how to address that challenge.
For decades, the nation’s organ donation process has relied on care providers at individual hospitals picking up the phone and calling their designated organ procurement organization (OPO) when a patient dies or is near death so that the OPO and hospital can conduct an initial medical screen together to determine if the patient can be an organ donor and then commence the time-critical process. This call takes about 15 minutes, on average. Because of the strict clinical criteria to ensure safe organ transplant, only 6% of these calls results in the identification of potential organ donors.
While 15 minutes may not seem like much time, the calls collectively can consume an enormous amount of the time of hospital and OPO staffs. For instance, a large health system can generate up to 5,000 referral phone calls per year. For its part, NEDS, the regional OPO in the northeastern United States, receives 50,000 calls from some 200 hospitals a year about patients, approximately 47,000 of whom turn out to be ineligible.
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https://histalk2.com/2022/01/28/weekender-1-28-22/
Weekly News Recap
- The DoD goes live on MHS Genesis in Texas, increasing its overall deployment level to 38%.
- NextGen Healthcare’s Q3 results beat earnings expectations.
- ADHD therapy app vendor Akili Interactive announces plans to go public via a SPAC merger at a valuation of $1 billion.
- ViVE announces COVID attendance requirements for its March 6-9 conference in Miami Beach.
- Change Healthcare is considering selling some of its assets to avoid competitive concerns about its acquisition by UnitedHealth Group.
- Cerner lists golden parachute payouts of $11 million to $22 million for executives who could lose their jobs after Oracle’s acquisition.
- IBM signs a deal to much of its Watson Health business to private equity firm Francisco Partners at a rumored price in the $1 billion range.
- Analysis finds that two-thirds of payers have implemented provider directory APIs as required by CMS since last summer.
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Enjoy!
David.
