Cloud Computing

The potential next EHR would more closely resemble modern interfaces such as Google and Facebook and leverage FHIR, if the VA indeed opts to move away from VistA. Undersecretary David Shulkin said the department is evaluating the best way forward. 

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."

IBM and the American Cancer Society are putting IBM Watson’s cognitive computing skills to work to advise people with cancer, as well as to counsel caregivers and survivors, officials said on Tuesday. Watson will filter countless health websites to draw insights from relevant, accurate and trustworthy information to enhance ACS resources and guidance targeted for each individual. In what the organizations are calling an advisory role, the supercomputer will use cancer.org’s 14,000 pages of information on more than 70 cancer topics. Watson will also take part in the ACS National Cancer Information Center’s de-identified and aggregated data about self-management, support groups, health and wellness activities, and cancer education. Eventually, ACS and IBM plan to integrate the advisor with IBM’s existing Watson for Oncology offering for doctors, a clinical decision support tool. Sixteen cancer institutes are working with Watson today to help doctors translate DNA insights into personalized treatment options for patients. Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine are using Watson to develop solutions for automated hypothesis generation. At Mayo Clinic, Watson is helping doctors match patients to relevant clinical trials. Once developed, the advisor will anticipate the needs of people with different types of cancers, at different stages of disease and at various points in treatment. It will become increasingly personalized as individuals engage with it, getting “smarter” each time, say IBM executives. ACS and IBM also envision incorporating Watson’s voice recognition and natural language processing technology to enable users to ask questions and receive audible responses. More than 1.6 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer each year, according to ACS. Memorial Sloan Kettering and MD Anderson are also conducting pilot programs to harness Watson’s supercomputing for evidence based treatment options and individualized care for patients with cancer.  Twitter: @Bernie_HITN Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

Some experts are predicting a spike in denials beginning on Oct. 1, 2016 when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will require claims to be more specific. Forward-looking providers are assembling teams to prepare now. 

Family Medical Specialists in Florida is using care management technology to get paid under CPT code 99490, and the practice has already gotten buy-in from almost every eligible patient.

The Genome Analysis Toolkit, dubbed GATK, will be available as a hosted service and a fistful of leading cloud vendors will also contribute to future generations of genome analysis technology.

The Venture Fund challenge will award winners money, mentorship and the opportunity to pilot emerging technologies.   

With the recent surge in ransomware attacks, cybersecurity is a top priority for healthcare organizations across the nation. But even if providers have top security measures in place, there's another component to consider: the vulnerabilities of third- and fourth-party vendors. Almost three-quarters of businesses said cybersecurity incidents related to vendors are increasing, according to a recent Ponemon Institute survey, requested by BuckleySander and Treliant Risk Advisors. About half of the respondents said their organization experienced a data breach caused by a vendor, but 16 percent of respondents were unsure if a breach had occurred. And another 65 percent said managing cybersecurity incidents involving vendors is difficult. "The type of risk we're seeing now is changing in response to our evolving data-driven economy," Rena Mears, managing director of BuckleySandler, said in a statement. "The risk to strategic data assets extends beyond any single third-party, but rather to the web of relationships that comprise the data ecosystem." [Also: Lack of business associate agreement, risk analysis to cost Minnesota health system $1.55 M in HIPAA fines] More than a third of businesses don't believe their third-party vendors would notify them if a data breach occurred. And a staggering 73 percent of respondents don't believe a fourth-party vendor would contact them regarding a data breach. A fourth-party vendor is often hired by the third-party vendor. Survey respondents admitted their organizations shared sensitive data with third-parties that may have poor security policies in place. More than half said they weren't able to determine the safeguards in place by their vendors to prevent a data breach and 60 percent of respondents said their organizations don’t monitor their vendors’ security and privacy practices. Only 41 percent said their vendors' safeguards were sufficient. "The inability of so many companies to confirm whether third-parties have had a data breach or cyberattack involving sensitive and confidential information should be a wake-up call for businesses across all industries," said Susanna Tisa, chief business officer of Treliant Risk Advisors, in a statement. "To mitigate this risk, companies should compile a comprehensive inventory of and conduct data and privacy risk assessments for all third-party vendors," Tisa added. "However, we found few companies represented in this research, in particular those outside the regulated banking sector, have done so." Twitter: @JessieFDavis Email the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

The hospital partnered with Techstars to create a three-month program to help startups working on technologies ranging from analytics of unstructured data to create artificial intelligence apps to virtual reality for improving inpatient experience.

In application programming interface deals with Health Gorilla, Inuvio, Medisafe and Wink Health, drchrono enables users to tap new functionalities with its EHR, revenue cycle and practice management platform.