Jessica Davis

Stolen credentials, privilege misuse and miscellaneous errors were the three biggest causes for health data breaches in 2015, according to the 9th annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report released Tuesday.

Officials uncovered 'significant risks' and irregularities during rollout, raising concerns about a viable final product, a spokesperson says.

The tool will help create a more accurate profile of behavioral health patients and identify any gaps in care.

Sixty percent of healthcare IT security executives are increasing spending for better data protection, according to a recent study. Another 46 percent plan to implement data security tools catch up with industry best practices.

The diagnoses of 27.3 percent of patients with depression and 27.7 percent of patients with bipolar disorder were missing from their primary care electronic health records, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association has found.

Allscripts is the top-ranked EHR vendor among medical centers of more than 250 beds, according to a new Black Book report released today. Cerner topped the list for medium-sized community hospitals with 101-250 beds, and Evident/CPSI was the best among small and rural hospitals with fewer than 100 beds.

Cloud-based athenahealth is expanding its portfolio to include machine learning and artificial intelligence with its acquisition of analytics startup Arsenal Health. Arsenal's Smart Scheduling tool has already been effective with athenahealth's providers, officials said. The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, will move Arsenal from a third-party vendor to a native capability available for all athenahealth's customers through its athenaCoordinator network. athenahealth also sees value as a potential "on-ramp to the machine learning, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence space in healthcare," said Doran Robinson, vice president of athenaCoordinator, in a press statement. In the future, athenahealth's officials say they hope the acquisition will accelerate the company's analytics and AI capabilities, broadening insights and enhancing offerings for its 74 million patient records. "The prospect of building on Arsenal Health’s technology and combining it with our own valuable data to positively impact care and expand the power of our network is extremely compelling," said Robinson. Arsenal Health was athenahealth's first investment through its More Disruption Please initiative, which drives decisions based on three pillars: the MDP Accelerator, athenahealth Marketplace and MDP Network. "The company is a testimonial to what we’re trying to do with our "More Disruption Please" program – provide young health tech companies the opportunity to develop and scale with athenahealth’s support and resources," he added. "By joining athenahealth, we believe we can accelerate our growth while effectively testing and advancing our predictive analytics technology," said Arsenal Health CEO Chris Moses in a statement. "To date, our success lies in our ability to track client performance, learn the intricacies of how providers work and ultimately predict their needs."

Symantec and Identity Resource Center in separate reports attributed nearly 17 percent of breaches to healthcare, found ransomware up by 35 percent, and said that organized criminals are using best practices much like nation-state attackers.

More than 1,000 patients of the Florida Department of Health Clinics in Palm Beach County could be at risk of identity theft after a recent medical records breach, department officials announced Monday.

Multi-agency collaboration aim to help app developers stay aware of consumer privacy and safety protections, while still enabling innovation, officials say.