Birth dates and Social Security numbers for 1,000 Orange County Sanitation District retirees were accessed in a phishing scheme, the district confirmed Monday.District retirees, former employees and board members were being notified of the data breach in the utilitys deferred compensation plan, which occurred in December after a file at NFP Corp. was accessed via a phishing email, said a district fact sheet.NFP is the districts $160,000-a-year financial consultant for its deferred compensation funds. District participants were advised Monday to add Equifax fraud watch, 800-685-1111, to their credit. The first year is free.District officials said the deferred compensation plan is on a separate system than its sanitation operations, which cannot be accessed online and have several protections from computer hacking. The retirement fund breach is under investigation.OCSD is still gathering information and working with the parties involved to fully understand the situation and the data breach, said district spokesperson Jennifer Cabral. OCSD will continue to actively work with all plan participants to ensure they have the resources they need to monitor and protect their identity and credit.The FAQ sheet said it appeared that a subdivision of NFP, while upgrading its fund strategy, requested certain information from Voya Inc., the districts plan record keeper. No personal identifying information was requested, but name, birth date and Social Security numbers were among the data sent by Voya around September 2017. The information sat in an NFP employees inbox until it was accessed in December 2018 by an unauthorized user via a phishing email, the district said.If proper protocols were followed, this would and should not have occurred, said the district document.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|18
0 0 |about 3 hours ago
|
Improve Disclosures and ControlsWith threats of nation-states infiltrating supply chains and landmark laws being passed, cybersecurity and privacy are critical aspects of director oversight. Recent court decisions and speeches from the SEC have made it clear that directors are not able to delegate cybersecurity oversight: directors each have the responsibility to personally understand cybersecurity risk and ask appropriate questions. Directors must focus on internal controls to guard against cyber-threats (including accounting, cybersecurity and insider trading) and expand diligence of thirdparty suppliers. Integrating both privacy and security by design will be critical to minimizing ongoing risk of cybersecurity breaches and state and federal enforcement.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 3 hours ago
|
We strongly believe that only digital health can bring healthcare into the 21st century and make patients the point-of-care. As currently theres an app for everything, you thought you make one that estimates the time needed to deliver food so anyone could order pad thai from the closest place possible. Every single entrepreneur knows that a good idea is as a tiny part in the success of the company as one single brick in the Great Wall of China. Funding, product development, a viable business model with an appropriate marketing strategy, finding and keeping the right people, being able to scale and personally grow up to the tasks and challenges. Now, that pizza delivery estimate app doesnt sound that good, does it?
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|10
0 0 |about 3 days ago
|
Over the last several decades, the adoption of automated healthcare systems has dramatically accelerated in healthcare organizations, especially in the hospital campus environment. In fact, we are already transitioning from the digital hospital phase to the smart hospital phase, when it comes to the deployment of automated systems in hospitals that use state-of-the-art IT. This automation has led to specific service-level requirements for uptime and availability whether they operate with on-premise IT or with offsite IT service providers.So, the emerging requirements of innovative patient care services and tools such as electronic health records (EHR), automated care management, point-of-care technology linked to EHR, automated case documentation, and physician order entry linked to EHR demand mission-critical primary and emergency power resources on a hospital campus. These power resources serve many missions, including basic life safety in the buildings (such as emergency lighting and fire protection) as well as supporting aforementioned patient care systems that could be IT related as well as mechanical.Thus, hospitals have a greater risk profile in the event of an outage and need to consider a wide variety of additional risk factors that they need to manage in the event of power loss, including building systems, medical devices and IT applications, and monitoring capabilities that maintain the lives of many patients in residence. And, most critically, hospitals need to consider the imperative of HIPAA-compliant data backup and disaster recovery options that they can rely on during these emergency situations. While utility power has proven to be highly scalable and reliable throughout most parts of the United States, backup on-site generators have had a more mixed record. These assets require large fixed-cost investments, have limited capacity, and in the event of insufficient power or loss of service may be subject to aggressive surge pricing from suppliers.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 3 days ago
|
Navigating state and federal rules and proposals is difficult, but keeping pace can be invaluable. As technologys role in both healthcare and senior care continues to evolve and expand, rules governing use can be quite complex.At the HIMSS19 conference, much of the talk focused on the Office of the National Coordinator for Health ITs proposed rule focusing on patient access to information and information blocking. In theory, the rule which proposes adoption of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) standards to support the secure flow of information would lead to consumers accessing their health information in real time via smartphones and other devices and becoming better partners in their own care, according to CMS Administrator Seema Verma.The rule was met with praise from many industry stakeholders. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt called the rule transformative for consumerism in healthcare, while former National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo talked about its potential to improve public health.The American Hospital Association, however, expressed apprehension about the rules inclusion of event notification as a condition of participation for Medicare and Medicaid.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 3 days ago
|
Each year the nonprofit ECRI Institute highlights its top 10 patient safety concerns for the year. For 2019, diagnostic errors and improper management of test results in electronic health records (EHRs) topped the list.Released in conjunction with National Patient Safety Awareness week, ECRIs Top 10 list noted that when diagnoses and test results are not properly communicated or followed up, the potential exists to cause serious patient harm or death. Providers have begun relying on the electronic health record (EHR) to help with clinical decision support, to track test results, and to flag issues.We have to recognize the limits of current technology and ensure that we have processes in place to close the loop on diagnostic tests, said William Marella, executive director of operations and analytics for the ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization (PSO), in a prepared statement. This safety issue cuts across acute and ambulatory settings, requiring teamwork across the health system.The Plymouth Meeting, Pa.-based ECRI Institute is designated an Evidence-based Practice Center by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. ECRI Institute PSO has received more than 2.7 million event reports and reviewed hundreds of root-cause analyses since 2009.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
The new app, called Question Builder, lets consumers input their health information and then brings up potential questions for them to ask their doctors. Figuring out the right questions to ask a doctor during a short visit can be stressful, but the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is attempting to help remedy this issue with a new app called Question Builder. The app is free and lets patients figure out the appropriate questions and medical information for them when they take a trip to their doctor. The technology was developed with consumer and provider input. Designed to help patients organize their visits, users are asked when the appointment is scheduled for and the reason for it. The system can then give users suggested questions based on this information. It also includes educational materials explaining why asking these questions is important, and a camera component where users can upload visuals and documents. Why it mattersThe average doctors visit in the US last less than 25 minutes, meaning getting all of those questions in can be challenging. Patients can get better care by preparing to ask questions about their care and communicating effectively with their doctors, nurses, and other providers, Dr. Jeff Brady, who directs AHRQs Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety, said in a statement. Asking questions to make sure patients understand instructions and other aspects of their care can help reduce the chance of missed diagnoses, identify the right tests that are needed and avoid unnecessary hospital stays.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
These issues surrounding data ownership and control and empowerment of the patient took centre stage at HIMSS19's 'Consumerisation of Healthcare Summit'. So is the data owned by the patient, provider or payer? Some health tech experts argue this is the wrong way to look at data. They say the issue goes beyond ownership, but who is sitting in the driver's seat when it comes to how that data is used. Summit participant, Christopher Sealey, cofounder of Coverus, pointed out that the patient can have multiple reasons for giving researchers access to their data. I have a question over ownership because individual decisions I make are not pure and my motivation can be compromised by my financial situation, my lack of information etc., and also my individual decisions of what I do with my data could have very big effects on other people and my community and workplace, Sealey said. "So I think when we say the patient should own their data, I think that comes from the ethos of wanting the patient in control, but I think we have to realise that individual ownership may not actually help the patients as much as we think. Nicolas Schmidt, chief product officer at Embleema, emphasised the need to "empower" patients to take back full control of their data. When this data is used to help create a new treatment, for example, Schmidt said that patients should be compensated for it.Providing compensation or incentives to patients could also promote the exchange of "clean data", creating a win-win situation for both patients and researchers, according to Kamal Obbad, cofounder and CEO of Nebula Genomics. The way the system is set up today, the people we want to be winning, aren't winning. The patients aren't winning, researchers aren't winning because they are getting data that isn't clean," Obbad said. "You talk to biopharma, they are telling us that the data sets they are collecting from third-party data brokers are subsets of data and it doesn't make any sense. We do want to find a way to engage patients and incentivise them to participate in this process to share what is clean data, to share what is longitudinally so we get holistic views of health data."
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
We hear a lot about cybersecurity breaches in the news, but were not always told the cause. The business or organization involved is rarely forthcoming with insight about breach scope and exposure. Companies only share details when the have towhen a customer or patient needs to be notified of payment card or protected health information exposure. We dont learn the cause, source or nature of the attack, and we cant always know if the breach occurred at the network level or at the delivery edge of the business on mobile devices. A lot of attention is focused on network access security; it can be easy to overlook the vulnerability of data at the edge.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
The famed digital health pioneer talks about his new book, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. The potential is immense, he says, but the U.S. needs a plan. Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of Scripps Research Translational Institute, is a longtime healthcare visionary. A cardiologist, geneticist and digital health pioneer, his ideas have been at the forefront of healthcare technology for decades.Topol's research and reporting on emerging tech, data, devices, personalized medicine and more have been explored in four books the most recent of which, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, was published today.Healthcare has made some big strides with information and technology, says Topol, but too much of that has been to its detriment. Technology has helped make the practice of medicine "robotic," he writes, "to disastrous effect."Physicians are burned out, patient experience is suboptimal, to say the least, and medical errors abound. But artificial intelligence holds the potential to help fix all of that."If we exploit machines' unique strengths to foster an improved bond between humans," he says, "we'll have found a vital remedy for what profoundly ails our medicine today."There are big challenges ahead, and healthcare professionals will "need to be prepared to fight against some powerful vested interests, to not blow this opportunity to stand up for the primacy of patient care," Topol says.But properly and humanely deployed, AI and and machine learning have to potential to restore efficiency to a wide array of burdensome healthcare processes, freeing up physicians to treat their patients in the way they deserve, he says. "The path won't be easy, and the end is a long way off. But with the right guard rails, medicine can get there."
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
Bruce Steinberg, executive vice president of HIMSS International, discusses the digital health challenges that are common around the globe and how HIMSS helps facilitate deep dives into the most topical issues in each region.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
Are we living in Minority Report? If we are, whose fault is that? Im recovering from the hyperventilating hyperbole in the reportage of IBMs labeling of a dataset of facial photographs and making it available to researchers to reduce bias in facial recognition. NBC News went with a headline that read: Facial recognitions dirty little secret: Millions of online photos scraped without consent. That might merit a pants on fire rating if it were in the realm of political reporting. The photos were not scraped. They were licensed.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
Taking advantage of public data and artificial intelligence, the Department of Health and Human Services recently completed a technology sprint aimed at developing digital healthcare tools. Leveraging data effectively can go a long way toward improving healthcare outcomes, and emerging technology is setting the stage for the development of digital tools that can help providers improve patient care and decision-making via data.Recognizing this, the Department of Health and Human Services in January concluded a 14-week technology sprint known as The Opportunity Project (TOP) Health sprint. During the sprint, 10 teams delivered digital tools that were built with federal data and AI to enhance medical testing, explore new kinds of treatment and improve care via analytics for a variety of diseases. Federal agencies partnered with private sector organizations on the project, including Microsoft and Oracle.At HHS, we recognize that Federal government alone cannot solve our most important and complex challenges, HHS CTO Ed Simcox said in a blog post, adding, the TOP Health sprint is a valuable step in leveraging skills from industry with public resources to promote better health outcomes.HHS also conducted the project with the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF), a program run by the General Services Administration. This past week, HHS released more information on one of the key challenges the sprint identified: AI approaches for facilitating an experimental therapy ecosystem. The challenge, according to the HHS blog post, sought to answer the question, how can we do better by leveraging standards and emerging technologies?
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
An expert from Avera Health, one of the largest and best-known telehealth organizations in the nation, weighs in on how to lay the groundwork for a successful virtual care practice. There are more than a few reasons why hospitals across the country choose to implement telemedicine. For some, telehealth can provide a board-certified emergency physician for consultation in the event they need to perform an infrequent procedure. Others rely on telemedicine to support providers, delivering a better work-life balance to clinicians. Many opt for virtual consults with the aim of keeping care local, avoiding unnecessary transfers and offering specialized services. Whatever the reason, telemedicine is much more than a connection between a provider and a patient; it has the potential to save workforces, communities and, most important, patient lives. And the sooner hospitals grasp the idea that this care delivery innovation can be a powerful way to tackle their goals and challenges, the better off they will be.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
According to the Polsinelli-TrBK Distress Indices Report, 20 hospitals have filed for bankruptcy since 2016. Looking ahead through 2019, medical cost trends remain stable, but extremely high as healthcare costs continue to rise. HRI projects 2019s medical cost trend to be 6%. This is consistent with the last five years, which have seen trends between 5.5% and 7%. By integrating preventative healthcare services, payees, patients and providers can all look forward to better results.Beginning with Obamacare, healthcare has been shifting its focus from acute to preventive care, using a 6:1 cost savings ratio model. CMS (Center of Medicare and Medicaid Service) has led this change by rolling out multiple initiatives supporting re-imbursement for preventive care. The initiatives consist of Annual Wellness Visits (AWV), Chronic Care Management (CCM), Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), Transitional Care Management (TCM) and BHI (Behavioral Health Integration).Care collaboration among providers has been a unifying theme for these initiatives. While CMS led the shift to preventive care, private insurance payees have also offered similar initiatives.Connecting The DotsCMS rolled out these initiatives as separate Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes. They are designed to be integrated in order to contain care costs, improve patient care outcomes and encourage care providers to focus on preventive care through revenue incentives. To illustrate these financial differentiations, suppose one of these initiatives is operating by itself without connectivity.A healthcare clinic reaches out to a patient who is AWV eligible. The AWV is performed and the clinic files for AWV reimbursement. If the clinic does not follow-up, based on the risk assessed during the AWV session, the impacts would be that the clinic fails to generate additional preventive care revenue due to a lack of follow-up. CMS fails to contain the overall cost as there is no follow-up for preventive care, leaving the acute cost to remain a major risk for the patient and the patient fails to improve his or her care quality.Furthering the scenario, assume that the patient is confirmed with at least two chronic conditions; therefore, he or she is eligible for CCM service. But without an integrated healthcare delivery, there is now another level of disconnection for all stakeholders. These same problems will be found in RPM, TCM and BHI, proving that an integrated healthcare service is required for preventive care. And that service must also be supported by an integrated health IT solution offering seamless, economical workflows across all these initiatives.
More >>
Shared by Thanh Tran, CEO, Zoeticx
|0
0 0 |about 4 days ago
|
A new report in Health Affairs looks at the success rate of hospital IT system integration, post-consolidation. Improved information-sharing through electronic health record integration is often cited as a benefit of hospital mergers, but a new analysis published on the Health Affairs Blog suggests that sales pitch should be met with "healthy skepticism."
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|17
0 0 |about 5 days ago
|
Christel Anderson, senior director of Interoperability Initiatives for HIMSS, talks about a HIMSS19 showcase dealing with topics including data sharing, patient engagement and social determinants of health that intersect with interoperability.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 5 days ago
|
SUMMIT CHAIRPERSON Tim Gee, Principal, Medical Connectivity Consulting CHAIRPERSONS NOTE Since the advent of the HITECH Act in 2009, EMRs have gone from a growth to a replacement market. Connecting medical devices to EMRs for clinical documentation has also gone from a growth to replacement market. In this new environment, the connectivity focus has shifted from clinical documentation of medical device data into the patients chart, to capturing and consuming device data in a myriad of ways.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|0
0 0 |about 5 days ago
|
Reactions to the news are mixed, with some experts saying the test is unlikely to make much of a difference. At SXSW in Austin this weekend, consumer genomics company 23andMe unveiled its latest test, a predisposition report on Type 2 diabetes.The test, which has not undergone FDA clearance and does not purport to diagnose a condition, is designed to help people understand when theyre at a higher-than-normal risk for Type 2 diabetes so they can alter their lifestyle. To assist with the latter piece, the company is leaning on its new relationship with Lark Health.This is a significant launch from 23andMe as its the first polygenic test the company has offered based on its own data (at least, the first since it pulled its health tests from the market in 2013). The announcement was accompanied by a detailed whitepaper.Why it mattersFor a company like 23andMe, increasing the number of tests they offer adds a lot of value, and can have a snowball effect: the more data they collect, the more tests they can develop and the more tests they offer the more data they can collect (since new tests will drive new users to the service).And tests like this, that are built from 23andMes proprietary data store, give the company a competitive advantage against consumer genomics companies without their database.Additionally, Type 2 diabetes is a huge problem, affecting nearly one in 10 Americans and costing the healthcare system more than $327 billion a year, according to the CDC and the American Diabetes Association.23andMe hopes that by letting more people know theyre at risk, they can prevent some number of cases before they happen.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|12
0 0 |about 6 days ago
|
Its not just computers or smartphones that can make your healthcare organization vulnerable to security breaches. Pacemakers, insulin pumps, wearable devices that track patient activity levels and pills containing ingestible sensors that track medication adherence are among the innovations that allow physicians to monitor patients remotely, promising more cost-effective care and improved outcomes.But connected medical devices also raise concerns about patient privacy and cybersecurity. Connected devices gather vast amounts of patient data and create more points for connection, raising the risk of a security breach that can involve not just the data but also control of the device itself.Companies manufacturing such devices should understand regulatory and litigation risks associated with them and regularly take steps to minimize those risks.Meanwhile, providers making use of the technology for patient care should also be aware of the dangers and step in where possible to ensure patient privacy and device security. In the wake of a major cyber incident, a healthcare organization may face government investigations, both domestically (by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other federal and state regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general) and internationally (by foreign data privacy and consumer safety regulators). Moreover, breaches can draw unwanted media attention, customer demands and litigation all of which require a careful and rapid response. Counsel must be prepared to simultaneously coordinate responses on all fronts.
More >>
Shared by Radhika Narayanan
|2
0 0 |about 6 days ago
|
