Cloud Computing

The speed and scale at which healthcare organizations have had to embrace cloud hosting, often without proper due diligence, could lead to lasting risks and vulnerabilities for a much bigger attack surface, according to new report from security vendor Vectra.

As virtual health deployments scale up and become routine, everyone – vendors, clinicians, patients and compliance officers have a role to play in keeping video and streaming remote monitoring data secure.

The health system’s algorithms can detect early pneumonia on medical imaging with the precision of a subspecialist radiologist.

Cerner announced Monday that it has inked new contracts with seven new hospitals for its cloud-based CommunityWorks EHR, which is designed for community and critical access hospitals. WHY IT MATTERS The company says the technology is well-suited for the unique needs of these small hospitals as they grapple with geographic isolation, workforce shortages and tight resources during the coronavirus pandemic. Macon Community Hospital, which in March earned the distinction as Cerner's first-ever "virtual go-live," rolling out CommunityWorks with online assistance to help staff avoid exposure to COVID-19, is one of the seven new clients. The others are: Clay County Medical Center, a critical access hospital located in Clay Center, Kansas, will upgrade with Cerner throughout its main hospital and four related clinics, with an eye on interoperability and patient and physician experience. Coulee Medical Center, a Trauma Level Four CAH in Grand Coulee, Washington, will install CommunityWorks at its main hospital and a pair of rural clinics. Odessa Memorial Healthcare Center, based in Odessa, Washington, will roll out the EHR across its 25-bed acute care facility and outpatient clinic to support providers and nurses as they work to streamline operations and improve patient care. Opelousas General Health System, in Opelousas, Louisiana, is a Cerner client since 2016, but will switch to CommunityWorks to help its two acute and 150 outpatient facilities streamline IT operations. Pike County Memorial Hospital, a CAH with four clinics in Louisiana and Missouri, has earned the Joint Commission's Gold Seal of Approval for Hospital Accreditation multiple times. United Memorial Medical Center, based in the Houston area, will deploy CommunityWorks across its four hospitals and four clinics in order to enable an integrated health record across its facilities. THE LARGER TREND In a recent interview with Healthcare IT News, Thomas Kidd, CEO of Macon Community Hospital, explained how Cerner's CommunityWorks met its unique needs – and how the cloud-based system was able to be implemented virtually during the pandemic. "Our previous vendor lacked the integration across our hospital that we were looking for," said Kidd. “We were not able to gather the data out of our system that we wanted to in order to guide patient care and report on. We also had trouble with our previous vendor’s billing system and decided we needed a change. "With our contract with the previous vendor running out near the beginning of the pandemic," he explained. "We needed to quickly implement a new system that would solve the challenges we had with the previous. This was even more crucial in anticipation of COVID-19. We needed to make sure we had the right system as quickly as possible. "Considering social distancing and safety precautions related to COVID-19, our options were to delay our implementation or work to complete the process virtually," said Kidd. "We had confidence that Cerner, our IT staff and department leaders would rise to the challenge, getting our system up and running and clinicians ready to use it." ON THE RECORD "The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the importance of having access to the right information at the right time in order to support providers as they work to save lives," said Mitchell Clark, president of Cerner CommunityWorks, in a statement. "The flexibility and scalability of this delivery model allows for use across community hospitals of varying sizes, making Cerner a right-fit for these clients and many others across the country. "We are very pleased to be working with these clients and look forward to providing the technology and solutions needed to drive increased efficiency and better outcomes for our clients in times of crisis and beyond," he added. Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media

The Dell subsidiary will work with the Florida-based health system over three years to transition its newly implemented Epic system to the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud.

The platform can now be used to furnish encrypted patient data to third-party applications.

Epic worked with the health system to deploy the electronic health record virtually, in response to enduring travel and social distancing restrictions around COVID-19.

The cloud IT company said it developed the athenaTelehealth technology in response to a 3,400% uptick in telehealth visits across its customer network from mid-February to April.

Central Logic CEO Angie Franks says with the Arizona Surge Line, health systems and state agencies are using her company's cloud-based technology to aggregate EHR and other data to assess the status of critical inventories and get resources to hospitals most in need.

Over the past decade, workloads and data have moved increasingly into the cloud. For the healthcare industry, that means personal health information is stored in multiple environments – and so security should be able to respond to threats across those environments too. "As the IT estate continued to evolve, the traditional 'gate in castle' approach to security became less and less relevant," said Ryan Smith, VP of product at Armor Cloud Security, in a HIMSS20 Digital presentation.  "It was no longer sufficient enough to have a firewall on the outside perimeter," he said. "Instead, you had to begin focusing on the workload. When you think about security, you have to be thinking about how you're protecting that workload." During his talk, Maintaining Visibility and Security Across Hybrid Infrastructure Deployments in the Healthcare Industry, Smith explained that cloud-based security failures are nearly always the fault of the customer, rather than the security provider – and that in healthcare companies, orchestrating security teams is often "a very fragmented picture." This means, Smith said, that security in the cloud is not a technology problem, but an operations problem – and a cultural problem – for businesses. The defense of healthcare information, in particular, presents a number of unique challenges, including a murky understanding of cloud architecture and data landscapes, poor authentication, weak role-based controls, stubborn end-user adoption, and a lack of orchestration between point solutions.  Another hurdle, Smith said, involves furthering the understanding that regulatory constraints under HIPAA aren't always prescriptive.  "Compliance is built on a checklist of how we should maintain best practices," Smith said. "Compliance is more of a point-in-time snapshot. … Security never sleeps, while compliance is often a once-a-year activity." "Threat actors don't care if you're compliant," he pointed out. Plus, as Smith noted, compliance often results from security.  Security platforms should protect the data environment from both accidental and intentional threats, Smith said. He explained that tools focused on Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection and Cloud Access Security Brokers can work together to address the all-around security needs of an organization. This is important, Smith said, because "healthcare data is gold to bad actors."  The financial impact of data breaches is often significant due to government fines, loss of customers or theft of intellectual property. "If you are subject to breach," Smith said, "there is tremendous impact to the business." .jumbotron{ background-image: url("/sites/hitn/files/u2556/HIMSSDigitalJumbo.jpg"); background-size: cover; color: white; } .jumbotron h2{ color: white; } HIMSS20 Digital Experience the education, innovation and collaboration of the HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition… virtually. Kat Jercich is senior editor of Healthcare IT News. Twitter: @kjercich Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.