Dr. Habad Malik sent shock waves through the local medical community when he left town for a week, entrusting his call system to a generic bottle of ibuprofen left outside of his office with a hand scribbled note saying “take a few every several hours until I return.”

“I was completely blindsided,” said Nancy Holkamp, a patient of the practice with arthritis. “I use naproxen, not ibuprofen. Does he expect me to suffer while he is on vacation?” Even his patients currently on ibuprofen were not satisfied. “He didn’t even bother to leave us brand name Advil. Like how cheap can you get?” complained another patient.

Complex healthcare organizations are streamlining their IT infrastructures for better patient care, improved efficiency and lower costs.

Epic this week sent out an update to its healthcare customers, meant to help providers nationwide detect potential cases of the Wuhan novel coronavirus, or 2019-nCoV. WHY IT MATTERS Epic has standardized the new travel screening questionnaire in an effort to ensure clinicians and other front-line medical staff ask patients about recent international travel.

The communication says vulnerabilities in Clinical Information Central Stations and Telemetry Servers “might allow an attack to happen undetected and without user interaction.”

The executive director of research at the cloud IT giant describes what CIOs and other healthcare leaders should be looking for at the global conference in March.

Growing up in Alaska, Dr. Yolanda Evans saw firsthand the healthcare gaps found in rural populations, a divide that includes mental health care.

As an adolescent healthcare provider at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where she sees youths facing issues such as eating disorders and gender dysphoria, Evans has kept those concerns top of mind since joining the faculty in 2011.

“I knew that I wanted to try to serve more rural patients,” she says. “I understand the needs in these communities.”

Remote areas often lack specialists to provide counseling and intervention: A 2017 Merritt Hawkins report found 77 percent of U.S. counties reported a severe shortage of psychiatrists. The Association of American Medical Colleges notes that nearly two-thirds of practicing psychiatrists are 55 or older, setting the stage for a substantial retirement drain.

Meanwhile, 1 in 5 Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year, federal data shows.

It’s why Evans and some colleagues are using videoconferencing technology to reach patients outside a clinic’s walls. Seattle Children’s offers telepsychiatry services not only in Washington state but also in Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

The hospital, which first established a telehealth program in 2001, has long made mental health a core part of its offerings. “Psychiatry was the most requested specialty across our partner sites,” says Dr. Kathleen Myers, a psychiatrist at Seattle Children’s.

The chief medical officer and co-founder at patient engagement tech vendor Luma Health provides a view of what provider organizations can expect in the year ahead.

Artificial intelligence will also continue to be a big focus, as it becomes more clear which startups are succeeding in their initial target sectors. VCs are also eyeing genomics analytics tools, as well as other more practical technologies.

Regional Samaritan Hospital; Kearney NE. After a long meeting of the IT department at RSH, Jay Koh, VP of Information Technology announced that new and creative ways of locking practitioners out of their EMR accounts are coming soon.

Elaborated, Jay Koh: “Our present schemes are clever, cruel and inflict meaningful annoyance to all EMR users. I mean locking you out after three unsuccessful attempts or forcing you to change passwords every week is solid. Requiring passwords with 12 unique characters, none of which is a vowel was brilliant. And the guy who decided to make you to use a different password for each of the 5 different applications got a raise. Did I mentioned that they all reset at different times? No, you may not use the same password from 10 years ago!”

The healthcare industry is ripe for change. From chronic illnesses, such as heart disease and diabetes, to risk assessment, there are countless opportunities where technology can enhance clinical workflows, improve experiences and elevate overall care.

As physicians today face high rates of burnout and patients demand increased attention from their doctors, artificial intelligence is emerging as a credible solution to such problems. It is freeing up doctors’ time and allowing them to administer care both more attentively and effectively.

The discipline, inclusive of machine learning and deep learning, is already making impressive waves in the world of healthcare today: predicting senior falls, changing oncology, expanding access to care in remote areas and much more.

Here’s a look at some of the ways in which AI is helping healthcare organizations to make significant improvements in patient experience and outcomes.

The healthcare industry is ripe for change. From chronic illnesses, such as heart disease and diabetes, to risk assessment, there are countless opportunities where technology can enhance clinical workflows, improve experiences and elevate overall care.

As physicians today face high rates of burnout and patients demand increased attention from their doctors, artificial intelligence is emerging as a credible solution to such problems. It is freeing up doctors’ time and allowing them to administer care both more attentively and effectively.

The discipline, inclusive of machine learning and deep learning, is already making impressive waves in the world of healthcare today: predicting senior falls, changing oncology, expanding access to care in remote areas and much more.

Here’s a look at some of the ways in which AI is helping healthcare organizations to make significant improvements in patient experience and outcomes.

Wait times in the emergency department (ED) are in the spotlight once again after a recent incident involving a woman’s death demonstrates that hospitals must do what they can to get patients treated immediately – especially if they have symptoms that may be life-threatening.

Could cyberattacks on healthcare entities be taking an ugly twist? In a recent attack on a Florida-based plastic surgery practice, hackers exfiltrated patients’ medical records and then demanded a ransom be paid by the clinic and some of its patients to avoid further exposure of the data.

Cost-effective and customizable, these portable tools are improving the patient experience.

Coupled with ongoing vigilance, the preventive measure can help medical practices preempt trouble later.

New findings show that radiomics and machine learning (ML) can be combined to help ascertain if late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) on cardiac MR images in

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A new report published in JAMA (Journal Against Medical Advice) found the Food and Drug Administration’s plan to streamline the process of approving drugs has been made possible by removing the cumbersome step of reviewing any and all pertinent evidence.

“When we stepped back and asked what was the biggest hurdle in the FDA’s process of approving of new drugs for the market we found that reviewing clinical trials and their evidence as the major rate-limiting step,” explained FDA spokesperson Ira Brisk. “Over the past few decades, we have made good progress rolling out novel drugs based on weaker evidence. It’s time to take the next step forward. Evidence shmevidence.”

Consider your most recent healthcare interaction. It likely involved some sort of medical device or equipment — a blood pressure monitor, a continuous glucose monitor, maybe even an MRI scanner.

This should come as no surprise: More than 500,000 medical technologies are currently available, according to a recent Deloitte report.

Today’s internet-connected devices are being designed to improve efficiencies, lower care costs and drive better outcomes in healthcare. As computing power and wireless capabilities improve, organizations are leveraging the potential of Internet of Medical Things technologies.

With their ability to collect, analyze and transmit health data, IoMT tools are rapidly changing healthcare delivery. For patients and clinicians, these applications are playing a central part in tracking and preventing chronic illnesses — and they’re poised to evolve the future of care.

But how exactly does this connected ecosystem work? And what is the real difference between the Internet of Things and IoMT?

The American Heart Association — and cardiology as a whole — is primed for the adoption of data-driven innovations, says Dr. Robert Harrington, president of the AHA.

The cloud giant’s director of product, healthcare and life sciences discusses these three trends and why they will be important at the big HIMSS20 event.

“This is a big step forward in personalizing cancer treatment and ensuring better patient outcomes,” said Professor Lim Chwee Teck, Mechanobiology Institute,

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have used big data analytics to devise a personalised tool for prediction of cancer, patient survivability and patient response to immunotherapy.

The new year ushered in a landmark California privacy law that gives residents more control over how their digital data is used. The Golden State isn’t the only beneficiary, though, because many companies are extending the protections — the most important being the right to see and delete the personal data a company has — to all their customers in the United States.

In the fall, I took the right of access for a test drive, asking companies in the business of profiling and scoring consumers for their files on me. One of the companies, Sift, which assesses a user’s trustworthiness, sent me a 400-page file that contained years’ worth of my Airbnb messages, Yelp orders and Coinbase activity. Soon after my article was published, Sift was deluged with over 16,000 requests, forcing it to hire a vendor to deal with the crush.

The Department of Health and Human Services has issued a draft of a five-year strategic health IT plan that is largely focused on providing patients with secure access to their health information as well as supporting secure, interoperable health information exchange among healthcare providers.

A new American Hospital Association report on workforce strategic planning trends says technology is well-positioned to help health systems combat professional staffing shortages.

Quorum Health achieved many financial milestones from a successful spinoff operation, and its integration of the athenahealth EHR across the org also helped get the Chronic Care Management program to 60,000 Medicare patients.