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.

Hackers used malware this past summer to encrypt data on some servers at Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York, according to a recent notification letter from the hospital.

In late July, the facility became aware of unusual activity with some of its servers. An examination by a data forensics firm determined that malware from one or more hackers had encrypted certain information systems.

Investigators say they did not find evidence that data was actually accessed or acquired by unauthorized persons.

Congratulations to HIMSS President and CEO, Hal Wolf, for his recent appointment as a member of the Digital Health Technology Advisory Group (DHTAG) and addition to the Roster of Experts, under the World Health Organization (WHO).

The Advisory Group will work with the WHO Digital Health Department, recently established to harness the power of digital health technologies to improve health on a global scale.

Hal will sit along a select group of candidates coming from various areas related to digital health, such as strategic approaches, areas for intervention, and governance structures for regulations and adoption of digital health solutions and products. The advisory group will work to provide high-level global strategic advice and support to the WHO Secretariat on the organization’s digital health vision and strategy. Members will also help review the digital health frontier landscape and advise the WHO Secretariat on possible effective new areas for intervention in that subject.

Members were selected for the roster and advisory group given their global expertise and recognized outstanding record of achievements in their own field, along with an understanding of and proven interest in digital health technologies.

Members serve in individual capacity and do not represent institutions.

Hacker attacks, IT mishaps and vendor errors are among the top causes of the largest health data breaches added to the official federal tally so far this year.

Operating rooms are full of sophisticated equipment that needs to work together. That’s where integration systems come in, and Sony’s solution, known as NUCLeUS, could be arriving in US hospitals next year. Here’s why that matters.

Artificial intelligence is a highly complex technology that, once implemented, requires ongoing oversight to make sure it is doing what is expected of it and ensure it is operating at optimal levels.

Healthcare provider organizations using AI technologies also need to make sure they’re getting the biggest bang for their buck. In other words, they need to optimize the AI so that the technologies are meeting the specific needs of their organizations.

We spoke with six artificial intelligence experts, each with extensive experience in healthcare deployments, who offered comprehensive advice on how CIOs and other health IT workers can optimize their AI systems and approaches to best work for their provider organizations.

Technology continues to transform healthcare through increased efficiency in work processes, leading to better delivery of care. For the incoming year, 2020, expect growing applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning aimed at advancing disease risk prediction. Expanding AI use will likely have a ripple effect, such as in genomic medicine which can help individualise management of certain conditions.

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Here are the nine technology trends that will spur more innovation in medical practice and research in 2020, according to Bernard Marr, an internationally best-selling author and a strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights imposed the civil money penalty after an investigation found that a division of Texas HHSC had a data breach that enabled unauthorized users to view the electronically protected health information of 6,000 people.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing a new rule that will make it much harder for cancer patients to receive one of these amazing life-saving treatments. At risk is a highly precise form of radiation treatment known as proton therapy. 

New technologies and workflows are rapidly changing the role of the CIO in healthcare. But the shifts that lead to digital transformation require an assertive, forward-thinking leader to drive them. Buy-in from executive teams is critical too.

Without those elements, efforts can stall or even collapse, said Judy Kirby, CEO of the executive search firm Kirby Partners, at the CHIME19 Fall CIO Forum in Phoenix on Tuesday.

Alex MacLeod, manager of HealthShare Commercial Initiatives at InterSystems, talks about the key areas where AI is expected to advance healthcare in the coming years.

Dr Layla McCay, director of international relations at the NHS Confederation, warns that Brexit “should not hinder” the collaboration between the UK and other European countries in the field of health research. After several decades of EU membership, UK and EU co-operation in many mutually beneficial areas is strong, underpinned by European legislation and infrastructure such as shared regulatory standards, databases and networks. We therefore need to keep a watchful eye on the unfolding Brexit process, which aims to move us further apart from alignment with the EU, in order to understand its impact and find ways to continue to achieve our shared priorities. A key question from a health perspective is how we can maintain the common benefits of continued collaboration in pan-European medical research.

Privacy experts say a warrant granted in Florida could set a precedent, opening up all consumer DNA sites to law enforcement agencies across the country.

Since voice-controlled digital assistants were introduced a few years ago, security experts have fretted that systems like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa were a privacy threat and could be easily hacked. But the risk presented by a cleverly pointed light was probably not on anyone’s radar. Researchers in Japan and at the University of Michigan said Monday that they had found a way to take over Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri devices from hundreds of feet away by shining laser pointers, and even flashlights, at the devices’ microphones.

Knowing what to do is only half the battle, say keynote speakers Michael Coates and Dr. John Halamka. Next month’s event will also focus on how to make good practices ubiquitous.

Digital leaders from Singapore, the Netherlands, Finland and more met in Berlin this week to talk about the transformation of their health systems.