Erin McCann
The IT infrastructure office at the Department of Health and Human Services has some serious security problems. This after the office received a less than satisfactory security report card from the Office of Inspector General this week.
If you were just getting used to CMS' electronic clinical quality measures, get ready for its annual update after the federal government recently announced measure changes for the 2016 reporting period.
Every 60 seconds, 232 computers are infected with malware; 12 websites are successfully hacked; more than 571 new websites are created, and 204 million emails are sent. Combine this with the fact that on the black market, medical records are worth $60, compared to credit card data, which typically sells for $20. "That makes us a significant targets," said Intermountain Healthcare's CISO Karl West.
Patient safety organization The Leapfrog Group has published its newest results for hospital safety scores, and some hospitals didn't fare so well. We have the list of the 20 hospitals that received failing grades for safety.
Another healthcare employee opened an email that turned out to be a phishing scam that ended up compromising the protected health information and Social Security numbers of 39,000 patients.
There's a problem in the world of data analytics. A new survey of health IT professionals shows that the lion's share of them see clinical and business intelligence as top priorities for 2015, but the majority also say they don't even know what data to actually collect.
How many breaches, how many compromises of patients' confidential medical information does it take before there are some questions asked of an organization and its security policies? One health system, for instance, recently announced its seventh large HIPAA breach.
At first glance, patient satisfaction surveys that are linked to hospital Medicare payments may seem great in theory. But tying hospital payments to subjective patient experience metrics may actually result in serious harm by diverting attention away from clinical outcomes.
When talking about the gender discrimination problem in healthcare (and there's a big one), it's best to listen to the people experiencing it: women. They're speaking up, with nearly half of them citing gender bias hurdles that have held them back professionally.
A cloud-based EHR company in Florida is getting a venture capital boost after IBM announced it was making an investment. One plan is to build off its platforms, including a real-time clinical decision support app powered by Watson.