One in 5 U.S. residents will be of retirement age by 2030; four years later, those 65 and older will outnumber children under 18, the U.S. Census Bureau reports.

Growing alongside the numbers of seniors is their use of technology. According to the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of all senior citizens now own a smartphone — and that doesn’t account for other mobile devices such as tablets, laptops or e-readers.

Such rising adoption presents an opportunity for care providers to employ mobile devices as a means to not only connect senior users to family, friends and the internet, but also potentially allow for longer and healthier lives.

Healthcare providers are using data analytics to forecast staffing requirements, which improves care and reduces costs.

Researchers sought to assess and benchmark how physicians view electronic health record usability, as defined by a standardized metric, and use that to evaluate how poor UX correlates with feelings of job frustration and burnout.

Richard Staynings, chief security strategist at Cylera, says hospitals have seconds to respond using defensive AI to recognize algorithm transformations taking place is suspected malware.

There’s an old saying: “Culture trumps process.” I’d like to amend this to say, “Culture trumps technology.” While this is obviously a play on words, one does have to seriously consider the culture of organizations that are acquired today in the healthcare space.

This is particularly true if the goal is to standardize on technology platforms and drive operational efficiencies and savings early on in the acquisition process. Underestimating the impact of culture on your technology plans can lead to costly delays and unplanned outages.

We have developed what we call a 3 C’s Approach to managing Information Services that has become a mantra for us. It means: common systems, centrally managed and collaboratively implemented.

I will mainly focus on the common systems piece in this blog, but will also touch on centrally managed as that is one of the keys to achieving the most significant benefits of merging and integrating technology platforms.

Louise Schaper, CEO of Health Informatics Society of Australia, says the manifestation of digital health issues locally may differ, but there are plenty of opportunities to share learnings from matters such as workforce.

Five CDS technology pros describe some comprehensive best practices for making the technology work optimally for provider organizations. Physicians on the front lines of healthcare delivery welcome the assistance of clinical decision support technology – as long as it works well, gives proper suggestions and does not get in their way.

Perhaps more than other healthcare information technologies, clinical decision support systems really require CIOs, CMIOs and other health IT and clinical leaders to make sure the tech is highly optimized for ideal performance. Not to mention optimized to meet the specific needs of the organization.

Here, five experts in clinical decision support offer their best practices for healthcare provider organizations to optimize the technology so that physicians and other clinicians get the most out of this key health IT investment.

Women have always been behind some of the biggest innovations in science—even if the history books haven’t been very generous with the credit. And while women have better representation in the healthcare sector compared to corporate America overall, report after report finds the number of women who rise up the ranks in healthcare remains terribly disparate.

In the spirit of recognizing those contributions in the face of those challenges, we’re honoring FierceHealthcare’s “Women of Influence.”

In this group, we have health system leaders, physician executives, health IT experts and insurance leaders who are each working to make an impact on their corner of the industry.

Richard Liriono, 33, of Bronx, New York is accused of installing a malicious software program known as a “keylogger” on dozens of computers and online accounts between 2017 and 2018, officials said. The program recorded and sent victim employees’ keystrokes to Liriano, officials said.

Liriano allegedly used the stolen credentials to repeatedly compromise password-protected online accounts such as social media and personal email accounts and is accused of pilfering through sensitive personal photographs and other documents such as tax rerods.

Antibiotic resistance continues to be a significant problem. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlights just how bad it’s gotten – and lets hospitals know which antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” they should be watching for next.

The cloud’s appeal in healthcare can often be attributed to multiple factors — including better agility and control, increased flexibility and support for innovation. A KLAS Research survey found that 70 percent of healthcare organizations have already migrated at least part of their computing to the cloud.

But a high level of adoption doesn’t mean transitioning organizations don’t face challenges.

“There’s been this misconception of the cloud for a number of years, especially as it relates to healthcare,” says Chris Logan, director of healthcare industry strategy for VMware — specifically, the long, often misunderstood history of the relationship between cloud computing and organizational IT in healthcare.

Logan traces the origins of cloud in healthcare to two key points in time: the early days of remotely hosted electronic medical records about 15 years ago; and the move to Microsoft 365 in 2013, when healthcare organizations began using Software as a Service. Back then, however, many in the industry didn’t realize the technology’s potential.

federal regulator is investigating whether the federal privacy law known as HIPAA was followed when Google (GOOGL) collected millions of patient records through a partnership with nonprofit hospital chain Ascension.

The probe, first reported by the Wall Street Journal Tuesday night, was opened by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights. “OCR would like to learn more information about this mass collection of individuals’ medical records with respect to the implications for patient privacy under HIPAA,” Roger Severino, the office’s director, said in a statement to STAT.

The initiative, code-named “Project Nightingale,” gave Google the ability to analyze personal health information, including names and birth dates, compiled by Ascension, with the goal of helping deliver more personalized medical treatment. The Journal reported that patients and physicians were not informed of the project, though Ascension said that some clinicians and nurses were involved.

While Google apparently signed a business associate agreement with Ascension, and the scope of the data sharing appears to be in line with HIPAA allowances, there are still many questions about how the patient information is being put to use.

Today’s healthcare system is facing many challenges globally, including growing aging populations, a rise in chronic conditions and co-morbidities, and increasing constraints on the healthcare workforce. As the industry works towards achieving the quadruple aim to help address these issues – the goal of better patient outcomes and improved patient and clinician experiences, all at a lower cost – there is a great need to optimise resources and increase efficiencies. To do this, the industry must embrace the shift to digitisation.

More than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the U.S. every year and more than 35,000 people die as a result of those infections, according to a newly-released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

The updated Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States (AR Threats Report) also estimates when antibiotic-resistant bacterium Clostridium difficile (or C. diff) is included, that number exceeds 3 million infections and 48,000 deaths. The report, which used data sources such as electronic health records not previously available, shows that there were nearly twice as many annual deaths from antibiotic-resistant infections as CDC originally reported in 2013.

A newly disclosed collaboration between Google and the massive Ascension healthcare system that the partners say is designed to improve patient care is raising serious privacy concerns. That’s because the project involves Ascension sharing with Google data on millions of its patients - without their permission.

Senator Mark Warner, D-Va., is scrutinizing the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights’ response to the recent discovery by German researchers of millions of patients’ medical image files being exposed on the internet - including by a U.S. company.

Over the past few years, telehealth has been gaining in popularity providing patients with access to the specialty care they need. In this guest post, Jason “JD” Duigou, CIO of a company that provides healthcare service support products, talks about the role facilities management plays in telehealth.

Sam Shah, digital health advisor and former NHSX director of digital development, says personal health records, health information exchange and other digital health learnings can be extracted from the Middle East experiences.

While face-to-face visits are still preferred by many, 90% of healthcare organizations polled by HIMSS Media say they’re using or piloting remote care services to boost care coordination, manage at-risk patients and broaden pop health efforts.

Dr. Eugene Hong, Executive Director – Institutional Banking Group, Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals, DBS, who has experience in both the healthcare and finance industries, or coined by the moderator as a ‘medically trained banker’, shared that healthcare today was what FinTech was like five years ago. Digital health is still in its infancy and one of the key lessons from the finance world that can be applied to digital health is the democratizing of data.

What this means is to let people to decide what to do with their data, rather than (banks) over lording on how they should spend their money in the same way how healthcare organizations ‘overprotect’ healthcare data.

The hard-to-face reality is that billions of personal records are exposed each year. A commonly used, yet incomplete solution, is tokenization. Tokenizing sensitive data does not eliminate the need to achieve and certify PCI DSS compliance. In order to completely descope from PCI, a business can partner with a data custodian (VGS) that handles 100% of data capture and vaulting – removing any compliance risk and completely avoiding data leaks.

Massive data leaks, at this point, are becoming a frequent occurrence – with headlines regularly popping up highlighting cybersecurity disasters that have impacted millions of consumers.

Earlier this summer, news of a cybersecurity disaster rattled North American consumers. The highly-publicized Capital One data breach of 2019 led to the sensitive data exposure of 100 million Americans and 6 million Canadians – including hundreds of thousands of social security numbers and bank account numbers.

When it comes to building cybersecurity defenses against bad actors in healthcare, generally speaking each provider organization, payer or pharmaceutical company relies on its own self-developed strategies and self-selected technologies.

But what if there was a more concerted effort by all of these players to work together to thwart hackers and other cyber criminals? That would be a better way of going about cybersecurity, argues Greg Conti, senior security strategist at IronNet Cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity incidents are a growing threat to the health care industry in general and hospitals in particular. The health care industry has lagged behind other industries in protecting its main stakeholder (ie, patients), and now hospitals must invest considerable capital and effort in protecting their systems. However, this is easier said than done because hospitals are extraordinarily technology-saturated, complex organizations with high end point complexity, internal politics, and regulatory pressures.

Objective The purpose of this study was to develop a systematic and organizational perspective for studying (1) the dynamics of cybersecurity capability development at hospitals and (2) how these internal organizational dynamics interact to form a system of hospital cybersecurity in the United States.

Methods We conducted interviews with hospital chief information officers, chief information security officers, and health care cybersecurity experts; analyzed the interview data; and developed a system dynamics model that unravels the mechanisms by which hospitals build cybersecurity capabilities. We then use simulation analysis to examine how changes to variables within the model affect the likelihood of cyberattacks across both individual hospitals and a system of hospitals.

Results We discuss several key mechanisms that hospitals use to reduce the likelihood of cybercriminal activity. The variable that most influences the risk of cyberattack in a hospital is end point complexity, followed by internal stakeholder alignment. Although resource availability is important in fueling efforts to close cybersecurity capability gaps, low levels of resources could be compensated for by setting a high target level of cybersecurity.

(TNS) — The federal government announced Thursday that it has slapped the Texas Health and Human Services Commission with a $1.6 million fine for a data breach that made the personal health information of 6,617 people available online.

The inadvertent release of names, addresses, Social Security numbers and treatment information between 2013 and 2017 violated federal health privacy laws, resulting in the fine, said officials with the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“No one should have to worry about their private health information being discoverable through a Google search,” said Roger Severino, director of the Office for Civil Rights.