Virtual reality has big potential to stimulate creative thought, conversation and empathy. Although it might seem more suitable for gamers or tech gurus, virtual reality is going mainstream for a variety of audiences. Older adults in assisted living facilities are no exception.

Just as today’s children prefer iPads to playing outside, older adults — a population at risk for isolation and loneliness, who are using technology in greater-than-ever numbers — are finding games like bingo less than engaging.

Which is why I believe wider VR implementation in the older adult living industry is crucial.

“The market is going to demand it, and not only the residents, but their families, their children, their grandchildren and millennial caregivers,” said Dean Maddalena, president of studioSIX5, in a recent CDW report titled “The 21st Century Senior Living Community.”

“It’s part of everyday life, and we want these communities to mimic everyday life as much as possible,” Maddalena said.

The report cites a growing number of providers using this transformative technology to engage residents, stimulate memories and even nurture an understanding of different ailments.

In recent letters to Senate leaders, 56 organizations, including the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and the American Hospital Association, have urged legislators to allow HHS to fund work related to the development of a national patient ID in the quest to improve the accuracy, interoperability and security of health data exchange and enhance patient safety. For years, Congress has banned such funding, citing privacy concerns raised by use of a national ID.

A new report from Manatt Health Strategies points to big differences in how return on investment should be gauged, depending most importantly on provider type – but also on acuity mix, IT infrastructure, staffing and other considerations. As more health systems avail themselves of the quality, cost and access benefits that come with telehealth, IT leaders naturally have big questions about how those major investments in technology infrastructure, reshaped clinical strategy and staffing changes should be paying off.

A new study from Manatt Health Strategies offers perspective, drawn largely from two case studies of different care providers, about how the return on investment should be assessed for nascent telehealth deployments.

“Most hospitals tend to make the mistake of selecting infeasible EHR options despite knowing their constraints. Sometimes, seeking a third party’s advice who is in a neutral position would be useful,” said Heungro Lee, Partner, VAIIM Consulting Group. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is defined as a longitudinal electronic record of patient health information generated by one or more encounters in any care delivery setting, according to the HIMSS Health Information and Technology Resource Library. Included in this information are patient demographics, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunisations, laboratory data and radiology reports.

The EHR automates and streamlines the clinician’s workflow and its adoption can be a means in which hospitals and healthcare organisations tap on to improve healthcare delivery by capturing structured healthcare information. However, different hospitals or healthcare organisations can have very varied budgets and approaches to EHR adoption or even improvement. Mr Heungro Lee, who is in charge of healthcare strategy as a partner at VAIIM Consulting Group, highlighted some key considerations for healthcare organisations and hospitals in their approaches to EHR adoption:

“Decision making is always difficult. But with a well-designed decision making process, the journey might be easier. The first step for EHR adoption for these organisations is to define what their constraints are, be it availability of budget, timelines to meet or the internal manpower resources required.

The next step is to prioritise the goals to achieve and these could be process standardisation, improving patient care and monitoring and managing hospital’s performance, etc. The final step is to source out feasible options based on the previous two steps. From my experience, most hospitals tend to make the mistake of selecting infeasible options despite knowing their constraints. Sometimes, seeking a third party’s advice who is in a neutral position would be useful.”

A legal expert who helped write HIMSS’ comments on the proposed rule offers an in-depth look at the new regs, and explains what they could mean for IT and infosec leaders. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has proposed new rules that will have a profound effect on how healthcare providers share patient data. The Office for the National Coordinator of Health IT and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are each reviewing industry comments on their proposed rules.

HHS clearly intends to transform how patient data is shared among providers and with patients by outlining permissible business practices that will not be considered information blocking and by requiring healthcare providers and their service providers to share data more broadly.

“Section 4004 of the 21st Century Cures Act prohibits ‘information blocking’ and authorizes HHS to identify activities that will not constitute information blocking,” explained Amy S. Leopard, a partner at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, a law firm that specializes in various industries including healthcare.

Leopard specializes in healthcare privacy and security. She recently worked with HIMSS staff on the comments to the HHS proposed Information Blocking rules.

The UK is moving one step closer to creating an infrastructure for the use of health-related data at scale with the launch of seven centres announced this week.

Led by Health Data Research UK and part of a four-year, £37.5m investment from the government through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, these hubs will, among others, seek to transform the way cancer data is used and expand opportunities for patients to participate in clinical trials.

They were selected in an open competition by an independent panel, after being examined against criteria including their potential for impact, and over 100 organisations from the NHS, academia, charities, tech and pharma companies are involved.

MITRE Lead Clinical Informaticist Sharon Sebastian discusses efforts to share clinical decision support across domains.

Exponential Medicine aims to cross-fertilize and blend tech innovations to get unstuck from a “sick care system,” says founder and chair Dr. Daniel Kraft.

A collaborative mission drives the staff at UCHealth: Keep costs down while improving quality of care. Accomplishing this goal can be tricky, but current models of predictive analytics for healthcare are helping achieve that balance.

“Our use of analytics creates a win-win-win scenario for patients, payers and providers,” Steve Hess, CIO of UCHealth, tells HealthTech. “And that’s something that is very rare in healthcare.”

Four years ago, the Aurora, Colo.-based organization began moving down a path toward predictive analytics by focusing on patient surveillance in outpatient care. And that has since compelled UCHealth to leverage an existing universal database to better predict patient outcomes in clinical settings — including operating rooms.

Dr. Clint Devin, an orthopedic spine surgeon at UCHealth Yampa Valley Medical Center in Steamboat Springs, Colo., helped launch that database in 2008 while working at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Formerly known as the Quality Outcomes Database (QOD) Spine registries, the effort was established in coordination with nonprofit NeuroPoint Alliance to collect, sort and analyze the safety of care, patient-reported outcomes and satisfaction of care across multiple healthcare settings in spine surgery.

Deep Dive: In Part 1 of a four-part series, healthcare cybersecurity veterans discuss the major risks facing healthcare organizations, and why protecting sensitive data and systems is a must for providing care.

Precision medicine is just starting to gain ground in the healthcare industry. Most patients have yet to have medical care designed to enhance effectiveness or therapeutic value for select groups of patients, especially by utilizing genetic or molecular profiling.

But some forward-looking healthcare provider organizations have started using precision medicine in their day-to-day operations. And the number of technology vendors with precision medicine offerings is growing.

Precision medicine is indeed the future of medicine overall. And as a result, it is time for all healthcare provider organizations to start thinking about how they can incorporate the high-tech offering.

Here, executives from precision medicine groundbreaking provider organization NorthShore University HealthSystem and precision medicine technology vendors 2bPrecise, Orion Health and Translational Software offer healthcare CIOs and other leaders and IT workers key best practices and tips for implementing precision medicine technologies.

Medisafe’s medication management platform is now integrated with Apple Health Records, providing an easier way to keep tabs on prescriptions and boost medication adherence, says CEO Omri Shor.

Because of the great amount of personal information involved, medical records command a high value on the dark web and can be listed for up to $1,000 each – 10 times more than the average credit card data breach record. Cybercriminals can then easily obtain this information and impersonate legitimate patients.

This is why digital identity verification is a key component of ensuring patient security. This is why all sectors of healthcare need to properly vet and verify their patients to ensure that they are who they claim to be.

Over the past decade, there have been more than 2,550 healthcare data breaches impacting more than 175 million medical records, according to the HIPAA Journal. That’s the equivalent of affecting more than 50% of the U.S. population.

People in the UK could benefit from faster diagnosis and better treatment for debilitating illnesses after the government revealed this week that it would invest over £130m in research for healthcare innovation.

This includes a £50m funding boost to support NHS diagnostic services and the work of the Centres of Excellence in digital pathology and imaging with AI, set up by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) last year.

The healthcare industry continues to be a favorite target of hackers. And the only way this will stop is for hospitals to take control of their technology. In this guest post, Keenan Skelly, VP of global partnerships and security evangelist at a market leader in next-generation cybersecurity readiness, offers a few ways facilities can strengthen cybersecurity and prevent future breaches and cyberattacks.

In the nearly 20 years since I started medical school, I’ve seen the practice of medicine undergo a wholesale technological transformation. Take medical records as a simple example. I am 100% certain that today’s medical students are much slower walkers than me. Why? Because the days of sprinting on rounds to get ahead of the white coat phalanx, pull down a cabinet and open a three-ring binder chart to the next blank page before the intern reaches the door ended a decade ago.

Today’s medical students are instead both blessed and cursed with EMRs and patient care technologies that track and trend every aspect of the inpatient and outpatient course, demanding hours of tedious, field-driven data entry while yielding treasure troves of mineable new information.

Men do it, women do it, young, old, Men do it, women do it, young, old, even doctors admit to doing it sometimes. In fact, if there’s anything surprising about the news that 50pc of us seek health advice online, it’s that the figure is so low.

According to new research carried out on behalf of the RCSI, half of all Irish people surveyed say they use the internet to investigate potential health woes.

The knee-jerk reaction to such a statistic is to fear that these keyboard patients are putting their health at risk by not heading directly for their GP’s busy waiting room.

But is the internet really such a bad place to venture when you’re worried about your well-being?

Several months ago, I was told I would need a biopsy on my breast. I was breastfeeding at the time and advised to stop to have the procedure. Reluctant to do so if not absolutely necessary, I sought other opinions online, contacting one of the world’s leading lactation experts, Dr Jack Newman, via the web, as well as experts in La Leche League.

Risa Stack, general manager at GE Ventures, discusses new trends in consumerism and patient engagement as well as advances in pharmacogenomic therapies.

The CEO of a telemedicine company has pleaded guilty for his role in one of the largest healthcare fraud schemes the feds have ever investigated.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed charges against 24 telemedicine executives, medical device company executives and physicians in April alleging the defendants were involved in a “complex, multi-layered scheme” to defraud Medicare, with losses totaling $1.2 billion.

DOJ said that the involved medical device companies paid kickbacks and bribes to physicians at telemedicine companies in exchange for referrals for back, shoulder, wrist and knee braces that were not medically necessary.

All told, more than $1.7 billion was billed to Medicare under the scheme, with $900 million paid out.

DOJ announced Friday that one of the indicted telemedicine executives had entered a guilty plea in the case. Lester Stockett, 52, of Medellin, Colombia, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Federal regulators have recently issued three advisories on cybersecurity vulnerabilities identified in medical devices. Some experts say the spotlighted flaws are issues commonly found in legacy medical devices as well as other IT products.

See Also: The Application Security Team’s Framework For Upgrading Legacy Applications

The advisories from the U.S Computer Emergency Response Team, or U.S. CERT, a unit of the recently launched Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, address the following issues:

A “session fixation” vulnerability. This is in certain versions of the BD Pyxis medication management platform from Becton Dickinson.

Existing access privileges are not restricted in coordination with the expiration of access based on Active Directory user account changes when the device is joined to an Active Directory domain. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow the AD credentials of a previously authenticated user to be used to gain access to the device, patient data and medications.

For exploitation to occur, products must be actively using AD for login and be connected to the hospital domain. Users who do not use AD are not impacted by this vulnerability.

A “use of obsolete function” vulnerability. This vulnerability occurs in the Philips HDI 4000 Ultrasound system if it runs an outdated and unsupported operating system, such as Windows 2000. The vulnerability could allow an unauthorized user to access ultrasound images or compromise image integrity.

“An “incorrect default permissions” vulnerability. This is found in some cardiology products from Change Healthcare, which was created in 2016 when McKesson Corp.’s information technology unit merged with Change Healthcare Holdings.

The vulnerability affects Horizon Cardiology 11.x and earlier, Horizon Cardiology 12.x, McKesson Cardiology 13.x, McKesson Cardiology 14.x and Change Healthcare Cardiology 14.1.x. Insecure file permissions in the default installation could enable an attacker with local system access to execute unauthorized arbitrary code.

Consumer healthcare businesses can describe their work a lot of ways: as wellness, as disease prevention or as healthcare outside the traditional health system. Or there’s biohacking, a term that has emerged to describe all kinds of ways individuals can optimize their own health in the same way that tech-saavy folks optimize their computers.

At the annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference this month in Santa Clara, California, representatives from Oura Ring, Arc Fusion, FitnessGenes, Everlywell and Headspace will demo their products and discuss how they fit into the increasingly mainstream world of biohacking.

In a sense, biohacking takes self-monitoring and self-tracking to the next level, because it has a goal of not only making people more aware of their health, but of helping them to take action on that awareness and information.

“If you’re going to help people make meaningful long-term behavior changes you need to help them develop that sense of self-efficacy and the ability to do this themselves, which really is about having self-compassion, acceptance that change is a slow process, and it’s a balance of how do you give people a sense of immediate impact and relief while guiding them toward more long-term, robust changes,” Megan Jones Bell, chief science officer at Headspace and one of the speakers on the panel, told MobiHealthNews.

The pace of electronic health record (EHR)-related medical malpractice claims has tripled from 2010 to 2018, according to a recent analysis from The Doctors Company, a physician-owned medical malpractice insurance company.

The company uncovered that the frequency of these claims tripled, growing from just seven cases in 2010 to an average of 22.5 cases per year in 2017 and 2018. While EHRs are not often the primary cause of claims—they typically are described as “contributing” factors—and the frequency of claims with an EHR factor continues to be low (1.1 percent of all claims closed since 2010), as EHRs approach near-universal adoption, they may become a more prevalent source of risk, researchers noted.

As such, the study aims to shed light on potential risks they may pose in care delivery, as well as the top factors that contributed to the claims. The study showed that EHR-related claims were caused by either system technology and design issues or by user-related issues, such as EHR failures; lack of or failure of an EHR alert or alarm; fragmented record; insufficient scope/area for documentation in the EHR; failure/lack of electronic routing of data; lack of integration/incompatible systems; and failure to ensure information security.

Healthcare providers who need to connect with patients have more competition than ever in grabbing their attention. Consumers are bombarded with calls and emails—particularly in this era of rampant robocalls—not to mention all the distractions from ads and social media. Yet communication that is critical to patients’ well-being needs to get through, because it’s rarely top of mind.

Research shows the average person has trouble remembering when they had their last physical. Or when they are due for their next mammogram. Or whether their provider offers important preventive options, to name a few examples.

Healthcare organizations need to proactively mitigate the threats of malicious insiders, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights reminds covered entities and business associates in a recent alert.

“Malicious insiders can succeed in harming an organization by intentionally leaking or destroying sensitive information,” OCR, which enforces HIPAA, writes. “The harm can take various forms, including loss of data, damage to the organization’s reputation, civil liability exposure, and potential federal and state regulatory enforcement actions. In addition to organizational harm, individuals affected by a data breach could be at risk for identity theft, fraud, or even blackmail.”

As of Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights’ HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool website showed that the number of individuals affected by breaches added to the tally so far this year has tripled to nearly 33 million since Aug. 5, when Information Security Media Group offered a snapshot assessment.