Many organizations that rely on network segmentation to help secure connected medical devices are making mistakes that put the devices, data and networks at risk, says Daniel dos Santos, research manager at Forescout Technologies.

“When we look closely at network segments, we see that they are not as secure as they should be,” he says, describing findings of a recent Forescout Research Labs analysis of healthcare delivery organizations’ device security practices.

“What we are finding is that devices with distinct purposes are in the same network segments when they should not be communicating with each other,” he says. “We see medical devices and personal devices like smartphones, tablets and smartwatches in the same network segments. We also see a lot of mixture of healthcare and IT devices - so all these devices communicate with each other.”

The femtech world is beginning to venture out of the boundaries of reproductive health and into other areas of women’s health, according to panelists at Bayer G4A summit yesterday.

Over the summer, Rock Health report that about 65% of all femtech funding has gone into fertility, pregnancy or motherhood. Today innovators are looking beyond the reproductive umbrella, at how technology and research can be applied to the field of women’s health.

“It’s a subset of the problem. As a woman certain reproductive medicine and reproductive health has been a part of my entire life, even into post menopause. However, there are a lot of other things about me that have nothing to do with that, that are part of my health journey,” Deborah Kilpatrick, co-CEO and executive chair of Evidation, said during the panel.

“So, I don’t think that it’s wrong, it’s just a small subset, a really important subset of women’s health, which is different than women’s health. We have to look at the health of women holistically, just like we look at the health of men holistically.”

Data collection and interpretation are critical pieces in the forward progress of the U.S. healthcare system, especially as performance-based payment models become more popular. According to an American College of Physicians position paper, the use of performance measurement (PM) is “intended to help achieve improved quality, high-value care, better patient satisfaction, improved health outcomes, and lower costs.”

To leverage the full power of data, however, we need to go well beyond the basic measures of patient satisfaction or an overview of a physician group’s performance. Instead, we must assess physician care on an individual provider level using clear metrics and hard data. This was demonstrated in a 2019 study in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, which showed how simply sharing a surgeon scorecard was associated with improved value in elective primary hip and knee arthroplasty. After nine months of scorecard distribution amongst orthopedic surgeons, the mean total costs for total joint arthroplasties decreased by 8.7%, with the mean total direct variable costs decreasing by 17.1% and implant costs decreasing by 5.3%. Length of stay also decreased slightly with no significant changes to readmission rates. Collecting and sharing individual physician metrics can have immediate positive effects.

For providers looking for ways to better serve their patients while growing their bottom line, it is time to consider implementing Chronic Care Management (CCM). CCM is helping providers access an entirely new stream of revenue without overextending their resources. Providers offering chronic care services in 2020 are earning as much as 85 thousand dollars each year per billing physician. This is the opportunity that many providers have been searching for as the landscape for practice revenue is changing every day.

Providers who used to depend on reimbursement from insurance providers are now struggling to get on-time and in-full payments from their patients. CCM is helping medical practices all across the country reach their revenue goals while also giving chronically ill patients a new chance at life.

In order to optimize your results after Implementing Chronic Care Management, providers should consider outsourcing services to a qualified vendor.

An artificial intelligence-powered chatbot is helping UCHealth increase patient engagement and improve the care experience.

Patients’ overall health continues to suffer due to the pandemic, with the majority of primary care physicians reporting that their patients’ mental health has declined during the past eight months.

Over a third (37%) of primary care physicians say their patients with chronic conditions are in “noticeably worse health resulting from the pandemic.” This is due, in part, to visits that are not happening: 56% of surveyed clinicians have seen an increase in negative health burdens due to delayed or inaccessible care, according to a survey of clinicians conducted in mid-October, seven months into the pandemic.

The results of the survey were released by the Larry A. Green Center, a research organization, in collaboration with the Primary Care Collaborative (PCC) and 3rd Conversation.

CareAsOne, a virtual healthcare professional community, officially kicked off its first-ever, global CareAsOne Summit. With Microsoft and AWS as technology partners, the community’s conference joins healthcare experts from all over the world to discuss the most healthcare pressing issues of today and perhaps tomorrow.

Speakers started sharing their wins, challenges and lessons learned as they reevaluate and realign future healthcare advancements. Centered around the theme ‘Health 2030: Discovering the Future of Healthcare,’ day one of the summit packed leading healthcare experts, including:

Glen Tullman, Founder of Livongo Shaun Anand, MD, President and BayCare Physician Partners Eric Yablonka, CIO and Associate Dean, Stanford Health Care and School of Medicine Deanna Larson, SVP at Avera Health and CEO at Avera eCARE Eric Yablonka, Chief Information Officer and Associate Dean at Stanford Health Care Arundhati Parmar, VP, Editor-in-chief, MedCity News Nagraj Kashyap, Corporate VP, Microsoft and Global Head, M12 Deepak Goyal, Partner, PwC Alisha Fehrenbacher, CEO, ElevateHealth B.J. Moore, Executive VP and CIO, Providence St. Joseph Health Elizabeth Bierbower, Host, B-Time Podcast, Former President, Humana’s Group and Specialty Division Charles DeShazer, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Highmark Adrienne White-Faines, VP, Market Lead Healthcare, Financial Health Network Jennifer Tescher, President and CEO, Financial Health Network Cheryl Rucker-Whitaker, MD, FACP, Chairman, Next Level Health Partners, President, Institute of Medicine Chicago Kanav Hasija, Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer, Innovaccer

On December 31st, 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported an abnormal of viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China. The cause of this pneumonia was later found to be a novel coronavirus dubbed COVID-19, leading to a global pandemic of historic proportions. Later, on February 26th, 2020, the first U.S. confirmed case of non-travel associated COVID-19 was found in a California resident, with a second U.S. case of COVID-19 appearing two days later in the State of Washington.

The software giant says the attacks in recent months on six large pharmaceutical companies and one clinical research firm - which it did not identify - were blocked. The attacks were waged by Strontium, a threat actor in Russia, and two hacker groups in North Korea - Zinc and Cerium, the company says.

Strontium is also referred to by security researchers as FancyBear and APT28. Zinc is better known as The Lazarus Group. Cerium appears to be a new group.

“Strontium continues to use password spray and brute force login attempts to steal login credentials. These are attacks that aim to break into people’s accounts using thousands or millions of rapid attempts,” according to a blog post by Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of customer security and trust.

“Zinc has primarily used spear-phishing lures for credential theft, sending messages with fabricated job descriptions pretending to be recruiters,” the blog notes. “Cerium engaged in spear-phishing email lures using COVID-19 themes while masquerading as World Health Organization representatives.”

A combination of symptom and sensor data from wearable devices could enhance detection of COVID-19 positive and negative cases in symptomatic individuals. Study authors, affiliated with the Scripps Research Translational Institute (USA), point out that “individual changes in physiological measures captured by most smartwatches and activity trackers are able to significantly improve the distinction between symptomatic individuals with and without a diagnosis of COVID-19 beyond symptoms alone”.

Resting heart rate (RHR), physical activity and sleep are among the biometric measures assessed in this study on improving COVID-19 detection, which builds on an earlier retrospective analysis on the effectiveness of consumer sensors to identify individuals with influenza-like illness.

In their previous study, the Scripps team created a prospective app-based research platform called DETECT (Digital Engagement and Tracking for Early Control and Treatment). This platform enables individuals to share their sensor data, self-reported symptoms, diagnoses and electronic health record data. As such, DETECT can facilitate identification and tracking of viral illnesses, including COVID-19, at the individual and population levels.

Laura Cooley, senior director of education and outreach at the Academy of Communication in Healthcare, dishes out tips to improve the telehealth experience at the Patient Experience Summit this morning.

Google Cloud pulled back the curtain yesterday on two artificial intelligence tools designed to help healthcare and life science organizations scan and analyze large volumes of unstructured text, the Healthcare Natural Language API and AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare.

The first of these two offerings looks to automatically extract common trends or other insights from medical records notes or other digital text that would normally require time-intensive manual review. According to the company, the machine learning tool discerns clinically relevant information based on the context of surrounding language, allowing the technology to, for instance, distinguish between past and newly prescribed medications.

What You Should Know:

– The American Medical Association (AMA) published an update to the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT®) code set that includes new vaccine-specific codes to report immunizations for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).

– The new Category I CPT codes and long descriptors for the vaccine products 91300 and 91301 for better tracking, reporting, and analysis that supports data-driven planning and allocation.

With the advent of pharmacogenomics, machine learning research is well underway to predict the patients’ drug response that varies by individual from the algorithms derived from previously collected data on drug responses. Entering high-quality learning data that can reflect a person’s drug response as much as possible is the starting point for improving the accuracy of the prediction. Previously, preclinical study of animal models were used which were relatively easier to obtain compared to human clinical data.

In light of this, a research team led by Professor Sanguk Kim in the Department of Life Sciences at POSTECH is drawing attention by successfully increasing the accuracy of anti-cancer drug response predictions by using data closest to a real person’s response. The team developed this machine learning technique through algorithms that learn the transcriptome information from artificial organoids derived from actual patients instead of animal models. These research findings were published in the international journal Nature Communications on October 30.

Even patients with the same cancer have different reactions to anti-cancer drugs so customised treatment is considered paramount in treatment development. However, the current predictions were based on genetic information of cancer cells, limiting their accuracy. Due to unnecessary biomarker information, machine learning had an issue of learning based on false signals.

Beyond the stress of increasing patient volumes and emotionally draining hospital shifts, RNs are grappling with alert and alarm fatigue, burdensome documentation, and EHR usability. But they’re finding ways to cope – and AI and automation are helping. Nurses, the backbone of healthcare, typically have to deal with serious levels of burnout – the COVID-19 pandemic has made the problem that much worse: 61% of nurses have emotional and physical fatigue, according to a new survey of 226 nurses titled “Leading in Times of Crisis” by Inspire Nurse Leaders, a nursing education organization.

Meanwhile, 53% cite challenges with inadequate staffing; 35% say it’s difficult to meet work and family demands; 28% wish for more adequate support programs for emotional needs and wellbeing; and 25% say they’ve suffered compassion fatigue in dealing with traumatic events, the survey found.

In this, Healthcare IT News’ fifth feature story on Burnout in the Age of COVID-19, six nurses talk about dealing with the myriad stresses in the trenches, offer tips on how best to cope – and describe how healthcare information technology can contribute to burnout, but also help nurses fight it.

The Department of Health and Human Services last week issued its 10th settlement involving a HIPAA “right of access” case since launching its patient records access initiative last year. But how might HIPAA enforcement priorities at HHS’ Office for Civil Rights change under a Biden administration?

The Pandemic has placed a huge financial burden on hospitals. That’s why reducing patient risk is of vital importance. In this guest post, Heather Annolino, RN, MBA, CPHRM, senior director healthcare practice at a custom software development agency talks about how integrating patient safety tool with the following three specific system requirements will help facilities save money.

For the last 20 years, the healthcare industry has been slowly shifting from fee-for-service to value-based care. We’ve seen the advent of the triple aim, the quadruple aim, pay-for-performance, and ACOs. All of this in an attempt to move from paying for healthcare based on quantity to paying for quality and outcomes. In the meantime, we’ve also seen a rise in consumerism and a focus on patient experience. And we tie those to the goals of value-based care. But the very word experience suggests we are still thinking about healthcare as episodic, and episodic care is susceptible to massive disruptions like those we’ve seen with COVID-19.

President-elect Joe Biden’s approach to cybersecurity will likely mirror that of his old boss, former President Barack Obama. Expect Biden’s White House to increase pressure on Russia, practice greater involvement in cybersecurity, and foster high levels of coordination around all things cyber.

The U.S. healthcare system has an opportunity for improvement this fall. Its initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic in March exposed acute issues, such as a lack of readily available personal protective equipment (PPE). It also called into question how to deliver adequate care when hospitals reached maximum capacities and access to routine care and COVID-19 testing remained scarce.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of restrictive measures such as lockdowns, many facilities, including libraries working in health sciences, had to adapt their services to the new reality. Pauwels et al. (2020) describe the experience of the Knowledge Centre for Health Ghent in Belgium, which is both a faculty library for medicine, health sciences and pharmaceutical sciences and a hospital library, switching to remote services.

As COVID-19 cases continue to rise across the United States, those of us in Emergency Room (ER) managing many of these patients are faced with a difficult decision every shift: “Is this patient okay for discharge?”. We know the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in patients aged less than 50 with no significant co-morbidities is low — but this jumps multiple fold in subsequent decades of life (CDC). This otherwise healthy patient population of less than 50 with reassuring vital signs is the easiest to manage. They are almost always getting discharged.

Healthcare delivery has undergone unprecedented changes in the past decade. Over the past five to 10 years, healthcare’s digitization has accelerated exponentially due to innovative government policies, changes in consumer preferences, an influx of venture capital, a growing number of digital health entrepreneurs and continued investments by industry incumbents.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted some of the challenges in our healthcare system and presented unique opportunities for the U.S. healthcare system to innovate in real time. Across the board, we have seen healthcare providers adopt telehealth at an unprecedented rate. While the last chapter of COVID-19’s impact on the evolution of our healthcare delivery system is far from being written, we would like to highlight 10 major care-delivery trends accelerated by COVID-19.

In this high-energy educational webinar, national speaker and author Elizabeth Woodcock highlights the key changes in payment for medical practices in 2021.

Recently, I attended a virtual oncology congress as a speaker where one of the attending professors asked me about the IT infrastructure in medical practices. Knowing the medical reality, he inquired whether those existing computers and accompanying systems would allow the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (A.I.). Practically, he wanted to know how I think those hardware should be upgraded to make it ready for A.I.

To answer him, I made a seemingly unrelated analogy coming from the video game industry: cloud gaming. This approach, where the cloud handles all the processing power, has gained traction lately; bypassing the need for powerful PCs and consoles altogether. What if the same fate awaits medical professionals and hospitals with limited IT infrastructure that still want to benefit from power-hungry technologies like A.I.?