Facebook says it has suspended tens of thousands of apps as part of its ongoing investigation into data misuse that grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company won’t disclose the suspended apps, but a court filing unsealed on Friday put the number at 69,000. In a blog post, Facebook’s Ime Archibong, vice president of product partnerships, writes that some of the apps have been banned.

“That can happen for any number of reasons, including inappropriately sharing data obtained from us, making data publicly available without protecting people’s identity or something else that was in clear violation of our policies,” Archibong writes. “We have not confirmed other instances of misuse to date other than those we have already notified the public about, but our investigation is not yet complete.”

The ubiquity of EHR technology in healthcare has done little to improve its reputation among its users.

Despite efforts from federal regulators, industry associations, and healthcare leaders, providers across the care continuum are still struggling with huge amounts of frustration, stress, and burnout caused by interacting with EHR tools on a daily basis.

Many industry leaders place the onus on health IT developers and EHR vendors to improve EHR usability and create new technologies that ease the burden of clinical documentation - and to their credit, vendors are working diligently to simplify the EHR interface and develop user-friendly products.

But cutting down on clicks only solves some of the usability problem. Getting data out of the EHR is just as difficult as putting data in.

Patient health information is often buried in lengthy medical records, making it difficult to absorb important data in a timely manner. The time and cognitive effort required to learn everything a provider needs to know about every patient can eat into the very limited window they have to actually speak with the individual and collaborate on care.

Ultimately, clinicians need more than a sleeker interface. They want a fundamentally different way to manage, retrieve, enter, and apply information available in patient EHRs to clinical care.

As connected-device use expands in healthcare, organizations must consider the hurdles that come with implementation. By next year, nearly 10 billion Internet of Things devices will be in use worldwide, IoT Analytics predicts. By 2025, that amount will more than double.

IoT devices such as wireless monitors for vitals and connected security cameras are already in use at hospitals, senior living facilities and other clinical environments. According to Aruba Networks, 87 percent of healthcare organizations use these devices for applications that, for example, track high-value medical equipment or detect and predict falls.

However, IoT tools pose unique requirements and challenges for healthcare organizations compared with those of traditional tech devices such as servers and PCs. These challenges often include a higher level of maintenance, increased network support and enhanced security measures.

Here are some considerations when contemplating an IoT initiative.

As Internet of Medical Things devices continue to grow in variety and quantity, their ability to save lives and collect data poses an escalating challenge: how to keep tabs on what’s happening with each one and determine whether any of their individual behaviors indicates a security threat.

The practice requires that healthcare systems use these intuitive yet vulnerable tools to conduct robust network monitoring to help identify abnormalities before they develop or spread.

Protecting a Wi-Fi enabled heart monitor or insulin pump, after all, requires a different approach than protecting a smartphone or laptop, as those latter tools are designed with built-in risk prevention to deter viruses and unauthorized users. And some legacy monitoring systems don’t have the aptitude to properly track the latest devices.

With a 3:1 ratio of devices to people in a healthcare setting, organizations must make network monitoring a priority to ensure patient safety and continuity of care, says Bryan McDowell, a vice president and CISO at University Hospitals of Cleveland.

“You can’t place a ton of controls on medical devices,” McDowell says. “Standard anti-virus software does not run on most of them. So, it’s important to protect everything on the perimeter, to have tight controls internally and maintain network segmentation — but you also have to have to place a high emphasis on monitoring.”

Eighty-seven percent of healthcare organizations will use IoT devices in some form this year, a 2018 Aruba Networks report found. But among those already doing so last year, 89 percent reported suffering an IoT-related security breach.

Likewise, a 2018 IDG report found that 69 percent of network professionals cited balancing network availability and security as their greatest challenge.

Combining psychiatric and primary care data, including social determinants of health, has also helped reduce ER spending from $2,265 per patient per month to just $875. Partners in Recovery recognized that a large portion of its patients also had undiagnosed and untreated chronic medical conditions, including hypertension, respiratory illness, diabetes, heart disease and obesity. Together, these factors contributed to significant overutilization of the emergency department and hospitals – with some Partners patients visiting EDs 70 or more times per year.

“A high rate of undiagnosed and untreated health conditions is common among individuals with mental and behavioral health conditions, with one study attributing 60% of premature deaths to these causes,” said Christy Dye, CEO of Partners in Recovery.

“Medical costs among these patients also are far higher than their mental healthcare expenditures alone, so effectively treating both types of conditions are crucial to driving down the overall cost of care,” she said.

My mom is 79 years old, and lives alone in a retirement community in Southern California. During the night, she experienced tremendous pain from her hip and inner thighs, down to her feet. She was unable to stand.

A neighbor heard her cries for help and took her to the local hospital emergency room. She completed admissions paperwork, was seen by a couple of doctors and diagnosed with sciatica. They administered and prescribed pain medication, contacted her primary care physician (PCP), and she was discharged to her home. Her brother (who lives in San Diego), was able to get her there safely while I traveled from Arizona to care for her.

She spoke with her PCP the next day and was referred to a local pain doctor. Four days later, she met with the pain doctor, and his office needed her to complete the same paperwork required by the hospital despite the fact it appeared the pain doctor had some record of the hospital’s diagnosis and incident treatment.

She was in so much pain, she was borderline hysterical. As a result, the pain doctor would not examine her in her current condition. Rather, he ordered an MRI to pinpoint where the sciatica was originating –L4, L5, S1 or S2– with the intent to inject steroids to the appropriate location to alleviate the pain.

We were handed a written prescription for an MRI, and another for more drugs. We dropped off the prescription at the local pharmacy and had to wait for it to be filled.

We strongly believe that only digital health can bring healthcare into the 21st century and make patients the point-of-care. Mental health algorithms mimicking empathy? A.I. outsmarting human doctors? Simple big data analytical software presented with clever marketing tactics? It’s difficult to assess the actual state of play when it comes to artificial intelligence in healthcare. Moreover, there’s no database that contains all the smart algorithms worth applying to medical processes. That’s the reason why we decided to collect every artificial intelligence-based algorithm that already received FDA approval – meaning that they are proven, reliable, and accurate solutions enabled by an official regulator for medical use. Let’s see the infographic in details!

The factors of algorithmic healing When we started to assess the universe of smart algorithms in healthcare, we took into account temporal and spatial factors, accuracy and credibility, as well as medical specialties where A.I. algorithms have a chance to make the care process better.

Concerning the timeline, we noticed an uptake in the appearance of new solutions in the last years, and you can see that also in the infographic. In 2014, only AliveCor’s algorithm for the detection of atrial fibrillation was approved. Two years later, the FDA found further four solutions ready for clinical use, while in 2017, six new algorithms were approved by the US regulator. This exponential growth just accelerated last year, when the FDA endorsed 23 algorithms in medicine. As the first approvals in 2019 also show, we do not expect the trend to slow down. On the contrary, we will most likely see dozens of new medical A.I. solutions on the market.

Looking at the spatial factors, while the most important hubs for A.I. development are the Silicon Valley, the Boston-New York area, Montréal, London, Bangalore, and Beijing, and the same can be applied in medicine and healthcare, the most decisive factor for compiling FDA approved algorithms was that it is the only yardstick for credible and accurate medical software. Although in Europe, the European Medicine Agency has guidelines and statements about artificial intelligence, the FDA is the only regulator with efficient instruments in its toolkit to access the credibility and accuracy of algorithms for medical purposes in detail. It also means that we had to stay on the U.S. market and consider the developments within the FDA’s jurisdiction.

September 18, 2019 - Cerner announced five finalists for the 2019 Cerner Open Development Experience (code) App Challenge. The finalists are invited to attend the Cerner Health Conference and code Learning Lab, where they can work with Cerner’s top engineers and developers.

Cerner challenged IT developers to use advanced programming interfaces (APIs) to focus on the consumers’ ability to access, understand and use health information in the EHR.

“We challenge innovators and organizations across the industry to join us in advancing interoperability, secure data exchange and consumer access to health records,” said John Gresham, senior vice president of Health Networks at Cerner. “People should be able to access and understand their own health information regardless of facility or EHR, which is why collaboration through open platforms and shared data is critical to our mission.”

“And it is coming quickly to a care setting near you,” said Cris Ross at Health 2.0 on Tuesday, touting “small AI and big AI” tools that can help revamp IT systems to improve the experience of clinicians and patients alike. SANTA CLARA – Mayo Clinic Chief Information Officer Cris Ross put it plainly during his keynote speech at Health 2.0 this week: “Our systems are not adequately supporting our doctors, in lots and lots of ways.”

And he counts his own world-class health system as one of them. Mayo Clinic completed a landmark four-year, 90-hospital, $1.5 billion Epic implementation in 2018. But while it was “an enormous project and by all objective measures we did just fine,” said Ross, “we’re also still at place where our doctors are frustrated and our patients are not seeing a particular difference by us doing that.”

Providers want to know that they have meaningful work, where they are operating in an efficient and effective way and that they’re delivering the best treatment that’s appropriate, he explained.

“But they’re also looking for joy in practice,” said Ross. “Being a provider is hard. And we make the bar even harder by layering on unbelievable levels of complexity and regulation, which makes their work incredibly hard. We have to help them with that and try to find a way to bring some joy back to their work.”

At Mayo Clinic, he said, “part of what we are trying to do is to pursue the next generation of care.” And to do that, the health system is embracing a wide array of future-looking initiatives such as its just-announced 10-year partnership with Google Cloud, which will offer security and agility – and will enable Google’s AI scientists to work shoulder to shoulder with Mayo’s own researchers, developing new models of care.

You’re ready to take the next step—or the first step—in your career: exploring health IT jobs. Where do you start?

Job seeking can be an arduous process, but it doesn’t have to be. There are professionals whose careers are focused on identifying talented individuals like you to fill open positions within health IT organizations. Working with recruiting and talent specialists can help you obtain all of the tools and information you need to get to the next level of your career—maybe even help you find your dream job.

To prepare you for all of the career opportunities out there, we sought the expertise of health IT talent expert Lisa Cannon, a member of the HIMSS Students and Early Careerists Task Force and the director of talent development at The Chartis Group. In this Q&A she shares her expert perspective on how to execute a job search successfully—no matter where you are in your career—and become a stand-out candidate to potential employers.

Healthcare technology continues to be a sector of significant spend, with Forbes reporting that public and private investment in healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to reach $6.6 billion by 2021. An array of new technologies ranging from AI and machine learning to wearables and microchipped drug capsules, once deemed science fiction, have the potential to transform the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Yet historically adoption of technology in health care has been decidedly slower than in other industries, leading to a question of whether these investments will deliver their expected return.

The reasons behind the healthcare industry’s slow adoption of new technology are multifaceted and include everything from regulatory hurdles to cost barriers. But the willingness of healthcare providers to embrace technological innovations at the point of care is certainly a critical factor.

While AI has applications in many disease categories, the potential to apply it in oncology is particularly exciting given the rapidly increasing complexity of cancer treatment in this era of precision medicine and value-based care. To better understand how providers feel about using AI in oncology, a survey was done of 180 oncologists from across the United States, including hospital- and community-based practices. Its purpose was to gauge their views on the potential of AI to improve care, where they see opportunities to leverage it in their practices, and possible barriers to adoption.

As more hospitals adopt a mobile strategy, multipurpose tools are becoming an increasingly popular option. Workstations on wheels still serve a purpose in healthcare. The carts help clinicians tote around all of the devices and equipment they need and connect to systems at a patient’s bedside.

But they’re hardly as nimble or convenient as the current generation of clinical mobile computers that have a battery life that lasts for an entire shift, are built to withstand drops and can easily be sanitized.

Small yet mighty, these tools help ease workflows and improve communication among clinicians. And they can perform an array of critical functions that once required additional or cumbersome technologies to execute.

“Today’s caregivers are being asked to do more with less. How do you do that? You need to make some part of their jobs easier,” says John Barr, a consulting systems architect for Memorial Hermann Health System in southeast Texas, where the company’s stable of Honeywell Dolphin CT40 and CT50 models has grown to nearly 400. (He expects that number “to grow significantly, by fourfold to fivefold” in the near future.)

Although Memorial Hermann still deploys more than 6,500 workstations on wheels, response to the new computers has been positive, with users citing security and portability as perks. The equipment also supports a systemwide initiative to untether staff from stationary command posts and bulkier tools.

“I think nobody would argue that access to information on a mobile handheld device is easier than dragging around a computer on wheels,” Barr says.

That sentiment is growing: Ninety percent of healthcare organizations plan to implement (or are currently implementing) a mobile device initiative, a 2018 Jamf survey found. And 47 percent of respondents said they plan to increase mobile device usage by 2020.

An interview with Richard Staynings, Chief Security Strategist, Cylera. Currently leading healthcare security strategy at Cylera, a biomedical HIoT security startup, Richard Staynings has more than two decades of experience in both cybersecurity leadership and client consulting in healthcare. Last year, he served on the Committee of Inquiry into the SingHealth breach in Singapore as an Expert Witness. He recently spoke to Healthcare IT News on some of the current developments in healthcare cybersecurity.

Q. Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in healthcare are all the rage now, and so are cybersecurity threats, given the frequency and intensity of healthcare-related incidents. In particular, some of the cyberattacks have become more sophisticated through the use of AI to get past cyber defenses. On the medical devices front, AI is also being used to constantly manage and secure the rising number of healthcare IoT devices as they connect and disconnect from hospital networks. How do you think the application of AI in healthcare cybersecurity will be like in the next few years?

A. Healthcare is widely considered to be an easy and soft target because “who in their right mind would attack the weak and defenseless?” …. or so the thought goes! The fact is that healthcare presents a rich target for cyber criminals because of the value of the data hosted and processed. When you couple that with a chronic historical underinvestment in the development of capable cybersecurity teams and tools across healthcare, you can see why perpetrators are so keen to break walk in. But it’s no longer the theft of medical records, or PII that concerns me, it’s the wholesale theft of intellectual property from research universities and pharmaceuticals by rogue nation states, (one in particular) and the potential to hold both hospitals and their patients to ransom by just about anyone. That’s what really worries me most.

I believe we are on the cusp of an AI arms race. Attackers are busy designing new attack vectors and methods to get by cyber defences that heavily leverage AI and Machine Learning (ML). Advanced persistent threats (APTs) that hide unnoticed on the network for years sometimes, while gathering vital information and gradually expanding their footprint till they own the entire network, just as the attack on SingHealth in 2018 demonstrated. AI that perfectly emulates the normal acceptable behavior of users and systems on the network and as such goes undetected by even the best cyber defences.

The customer journey is the process in which a consumer becomes a customer. It’s not nearly as direct as you might think, especially in a day and age where the majority of consumers will do extensive research online on a variety of different platforms to determine what their problem is, what the best solution to their problem is, and what brand to choose. Because of how complex and unique the customer journey can be, you will want to create a customer journey map, or visual representation of that process, to help guide your marketing efforts. This visual representation is typically a diagram that shows the steps your customers go through when engaging with your brand through various touch-points both online and offline.

Cybersecurity Strategies for Healthcare IoT

Hospitals with strong risk management strategies will be better positioned to respond to cyberattacks, according to a report from Moody’s Investors Service. Cyberattacks pose a greater fiscal and credit risk to nonprofit hospitals than any other sector of municipal finance due to the increasingly interconnected nature of hospital operations and information technology.

Hospitals with strong risk management strategies will be better positioned to respond to these operational and financial disruptions, according to a report from Moody’s Investors Service.

Small hospitals face the biggest risk, because many lack the necessary cybersecurity resources and will be less able to absorb any financial impact, according to report authors Jennifer Barr, a Moody’s analyst, and Lisa Goldstein, Moody’s associate managing director.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.