When healthcare IT professional Laura Jantos became the patient, she gained a new perspective on what is lacking in consumer-facing technologies.

Laura Jantos, who is retired as a partner in a management consulting firm leading its HCIT practice, will share her experience during HIMSS20.

From ensuring quality care and educating providers to managing organizational culture, chief medical officers have no shortage of responsibilities.

But as electronic health records, value-based reimbursement, changing consumer preferences, data-driven wearables and artificial intelligence grow in scope and necessity, CMOs find many new challenges on their plate. That, in turn, is broadening the role, requiring leaders to be tech-savvy, financially focused and highly collaborative with vendors and business teams.

HealthTech recently spoke to Dr. Kent Bishop about the balance. Bishop, an obstetrician/gynecologist, is CMO at ProMedica Physicians and Acute Care in Toledo, Ohio, and president of women’s services and chief experience officer at ProMedica.

As cases of the COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus) continue to spread across China and beyond, the Chinese government has released a new app intended to help citizens check whether they came into contact with the virus.

App users are asked to register a phone number, name and ID number in or to see if they were in contact with someone infected, according to Chinese state media outlet Xinhua, which first reported the story.

Users are able to get the app by scanning a QR code through platforms like WeChat, Alipay and QQ. The app will then give them information on whether they came into “close contact” with the disease, which the government defines as being in a close distance to someone with no protection who has a confirmed case or a suspected case.

The tool will act as a way of collecting data as well as to educate citizens on what to do if they have been in close contact with the virus — which is to stay at home and get advice from health authorities.

The countdown is on for medical device manufacturers to prepare for the EU Regulation on Medical Devices (MDR), which will fully apply in member states from May this year.

But in a recently published paper, trade association MedTech Europe raised concerns that the new regulatory system is not ready to support the transition of technology from the old regime.

The new EU MDR came into force on May 5, 2017, replacing two existing directives, and applies after a transitional period of three years, which falls on May 26, 2020.

Under the MDR, manufacturers have clearer obligations to monitor the quality, performance and safety of devices.

Also, existing devices which have been CE marked under the current EU Medical Device Directive (MDD) must be recertified to abide by the new MDR.

MedTech Europe says that manufacturers may not be able to keep existing devices on the market, because of challenges such as a lack of notified body (NB) capacity, lack of EU guidance on certain aspects of the regulation, and lack of expert panels.

On 11 February, the World Health Organization (WHO) named the novel coronavirus, previously referred to as 2019-nCoV, COVID-19, which stands for ‘coronavirus disease 2019.’

The organisation underlined that it was careful to find a name without stigma, ie one that “did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, or an individual or group of people.” It followed best practices for naming of new human infectious diseases developed in consultation and collaboration with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

The vendor aims to transform healthcare interoperability with faster onboarding, easier maintenance, higher availability and lower costs, a company VP contends. InterSystems at HIMSS20 will highlight its new offering, HealthShare Managed Connections. The interoperability technology is designed to dramatically reduce the time and cost of connecting healthcare organizations.

Today, most cross-organization connections are one-to-one, even though they include numerous interfaces to the same electronic health records and multiple connections to the same organizations.

The UK and the EU should ‘work as one’ to further the deployment of AI in healthcare, writes Dr Layla McCay, director of international relations at the NHS Confederation. My colleagues at NHSX are starting to uncover the significant opportunities offered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for keeping people healthy, improving care and saving lives. In the field of diagnostics alone, we are seeing capabilities develop in areas such as rapid image recognition, symptom checking and risk stratification. AI could help, for example, to personalise health screening and treatments for cancer, eye disease and a range of other conditions. Furthermore, it’s not just patients who can benefit, but also clinicians, enabling them to make the best use of their expertise, informing their decisions and saving time.

The UK is not alone, Europe is also looking closely at how this fast-developing area can change people’s lives, particularly in the field of healthcare.

The news comes as the death toll in mainland China is reported to have exceeded 1,000. InterSystems announced this week that it released a functionality allowing users of the latest editions of TrakCare to screen and support patients with 2019-nCoV, as the fight against the spread of the outbreak intensifies.

The company said customers in China, the UK, the United Arab Emirates and others had already started using it.

The functionality is based on guidance from the World Health Organization and links to the Wuhan Coronavirus Global Cases app from the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering in the US.

“We are proud to have deployed this quickly for our users,” said TrakCare chief medical officer Hazem El Oraby.

The 2020 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition, which takes place March 9-13 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, is fast approaching. Be sure to check here regularly at Healthcare IT News for our previews, onsite coverage and recaps of the big show. From now into the spring, our editors, reporters and videographers will bring you all the must-know information about new technologies, healthcare trends, policy changes and other innovations, insights and interviews with top thought leaders across this fast-evolving industry.

Nusha Safabakhsh has long been intrigued by how humans influence system design and how these systems can be best optimized in care decisions.

Traditionally, health systems have measured volume, she said. This has changed to measuring value. The operationalization of measurement and analytics to demonstrate value is especially important in end-of-life hospice care and in palliative care.

Safabakhsh calls it whole person care, and as executive director, Measurement and Analytics at Providence St. Joseph Health, has been working with an analytics team on the whole person care model for the Institute for Human Caring.

As telehealth makes inroads into a wider range of medical specialties, cardiovascular care is among the fields offering more virtual visits.

This branch of telemedicine, known as telecardiology, seeks to achieve real-time, remote diagnosis and treatment of heart disease — including congestive heart failure, cardiac arrest and arrhythmia.

One of those ways is raising compliance rates for cardiac rehab, a medically supervised program designed to improve cardiovascular health after a heart attack or other event requiring care. But only 25 percent of patients follow the prescribed regimen, according to the Great Lakes Cardiac Rehabilitation Consortium, an international group that was formed to address the disparity.

Making the effort is crucial: Cardiac rehab is “the only intervention that changes outcomes,” says Robert Berry, clinical coordinator of cardiac rehabilitation at Henry Ford Health System, which is part of the consortium.

Although the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s new privacy framework, which was released Jan. 16, is agnostic toward any particular privacy law, “it gives organizations building blocks to help them meet any obligations under any particular law or jurisdiction that they’re subject to,” says Naomi Lefkovitz, a senior privacy policy adviser and program manager for privacy engineering at NIST.

“For example, you might have an obligation under GDPR [EU’s General Data Protection Regulation] to accept data deletion requests from individuals. The framework is not a prescriptive requirement-based approach, but rather you have to think through the kind of policies and technical capabilities that you might need,” Lefkovitz explains in an interview with Information Security Media Group.

“One of the activities or outcomes that we have is data can be accessed for deletion because if you don’t have the capability to actually go in, find and extract data in your systems, then meeting a legal obligation is just going to be aspirational,” she says.

Causes of cancer are being catalogued by a huge international study revealing the genetic fingerprints of DNA-damaging processes that drive cancer development. This detailed list of genetic fingerprints will provide clues how each cancer developed. This will help scientists search for previously unknown causes of cancer, leading to better information for prevention strategies, and help signpost new directions for cancer diagnosis and treatments.

WARWICK, NY – A team of farmers in upstate New York have successfully infused apples with 80 mg of atorvastatin in the hopes it keeps even more doctors away on a daily basis.

“They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and my doctor and nurse friends joke about putting statins in the water because of their health benefits,” explained apple farmer Fred Delicious. “It only seemed natural to put one and one together.”

The new coronavirus was declared a global emergency (a Public Health Emergency of International Concern – PHEIC) during the second meeting of the Emergency Committee convened by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on 30 January.

“The main reason for this declaration is not what is happening in China but what is happening in other countries,” he said. The concern is that it could spread to countries with weaker health systems, such as Africa or large Asian cities.

In the first years following implementation of the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule in 2009, incidents involving lost or stolen unencrypted devices dominated the health data breach tally. But in recent years, such cases have been relatively rare.

As healthcare providers around the world prepare to treat patients afflicted with the novel coronavirus, U.S. regulators are reminding organizations about their HIPAA compliance duties involving patient privacy, including permitted data disclosures for public health activities.

Its message to attendees will revolve around clinical documentation and how it is using AI, machine learning, NLP and more to ease physician workloads and enhance patient experiences.

Radiologists are expected to be among the first healthcare professionals to be involved in the diagnosis of 2019-nCoV through chest CT. Early disease recognition is critical not only for prompt treatment, but also for patient isolation and effective public health containment and response.

To provide radiologists with more information about the new respiratory illness caused by the new virus, Radiology published an online article named “CT Imaging of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Pneumonia”.

Offering high-quality medical care as affordably and efficiently as possible is a tremendous balancing act for healthcare providers. In this guest post, Angela Fernandez, VP of Community Engagement at an information standards organization, explains how operational excellence supported by advanced, system-wide data management is a linchpin to optimizing efficiencies while maintaining a primary focus on patient care and safety.

It’s time to see if your Hospital Compare star rating has changed. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced new adjustments to the federal Hospital Compare website, with updates to the measurement data and Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings, but no changes to the existing methodology.

Based on the Emento enterprise platform, the My Digital Care Guide app enables hospitals to create care guides that provide patients with relevant information in a timely manner, leading to more effective consultations and fewer last-minute cancellations.

The German healthcare system is undergoing several digital upgrades this year in order to improve the service.

One of the key features of the plan is that, for the first time, doctors will be able to prescribe healthcare apps to patients.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), is reconvening the International Health Regulations Emergency Commit

It’s not just patient data contained in the electronic health records and email systems of healthcare entities that are in the crosshairs of hackers. The intellectual property, including research results, of biotechnology companies and other medical organizations is also increasingly a target for hackers, who sometimes dump data on hacker forums or public websites.