Despite the record number of major healthcare breaches in just the past year, 74 percent of consumers surveyed by the National Cyber Security Alliance said they trust healthcare providers the most with personal information, according to a study released Thursday to mark Data Privacy Day. The day is an annual international effort launched by the NCSA to create awareness about the importance of securing personal information, both as a consumers and as organizations. This year's theme is "Respecting Privacy, Safeguarding Data and Enabling Trust." "These are the three legs of the stool for the Internet," said NCSA Executive Director Michael Kaiser. "We believe everyone needs to have respect for the information."
Partners HealthCare, as it steps up efforts to commercialize research done at its labs and hospitals, is offering up to $1 million in grants for employees who come up with promising ideas for new drugs, devices and other inventions that have the potential to improve patient care. The grants, up to $100,000 each, are open not just to researchers, but to anyone in Partners' workforce of 64,000 who has a good idea. The small sum is intended to help early-stage ideas get off the ground. Partners, with a research budget of $1.5 billion, and has been working to increase the deals it does with the life sciences industry, including by licensing technology and spinning off companies.
Lawyers representing residents opposed to a planned UPMC hospital in Pleasant Hills are being financially backed by Highmark Health. In a statement released by Allegheny Health Network Thursday afternoon, the health care provider and wholly owned subsidiary of Highmark Health, said it "is proud to also help support the independent objections of many Pleasant Hills residents who are expressing outrage over UPMC's attempt to build a sprawling medical complex in their backyards." "The First Amendment protects these citizens' right to speak out and Jefferson Hospital's right to support them," said Jefferson Hospital CEO Louise Urban in the statement.
Niva Shah, a first year pediatric resident at Morristown Medical Center, recalls nervously playing with her hands under the table when she delivered the bad news. "I had to tell parents that their child, a star varsity athlete, had developed a severe cardiomyopathy and could no longer participate in sports at all," the 26-year-old Morristown resident said of the unfortunate news she had to share. She'd had only a few minutes to prepare for the experience, one which she said didn't yet fully understand would represent not only a crushing blow to the devastated parents but a moment in time that would be indelibly etched in the family's annals.
The onset of cloud computing brought with it an information technology revolution, allowing organizations to have their IT resources hosted off site, reducing their costs and simplifying operations. Unfortunately, the move to the cloud did not mean organizations could forget about requirements for a successful security profile. Healthcare organizations making the move to a cloud-centric strategy can't lower their guard on security defenses, said Chris Bowen, founder and chief privacy and security officer of ClearDATA, a healthcare cloud computing company. "People may think that by offloading security responsibility to the cloud, they won't have to worry, but that's not the case," Bowen said. "We know that threats exist in the cloud."
That evening I leafed through last week?s issue of JAMA, which, unexpectedly, turned out to be entirely devoted to death, dying and the end of life. The issue was packed with intriguing articles that debated physician-assisted suicide, end-of-life care, statistics about death in different countries, the role of the I.C.U. But what caught my eye was a research letter tucked at the end, with the very medical-journal title of "Association of Occupation as a Physician With Likelihood of Dying in a Hospital." Written by colleagues of mine at New York University School of Medicine, the study tried to elucidate whether doctors died predominantly at home or predominantly in the hospital.