A publicly funded nonprofit is weighing a policy that would give doctors and hospitals more access to patients’ health records, and one of the state’s leading privacy advocates opposes the move. Officials with the Vermont Information Technology Leaders (VITL) are talking with stakeholders about a policy change that would give doctors automatic access to patient records unless a patient objects.
Edmund Billings spends about three weeks out of the month living out of a suitcase. He racked up 20,000 miles on the road in the past nine months, while driving to some of the most rural and remote parts of the country. Billings is a traveling salesman of sorts, but his business isn't vacuum cleaners or encyclopedias. It's health software. Billings is the associate chief medical officer for acute care at AthenaHealth, an IT company with a market cap of more than $5 billion.
Massachusetts General Hospital announced Wednesday it suffered a privacy incident involving information stored by a third-party vendor. On Feb. 8, MGH learned that an unauthorized individual gained access to electronic files stored on the system and later confirmed the files contained some MGH dental practice information.
IBM is teaming up with the federal government to bring Watson technology into America’s largest hospital and healthcare network. The initiative is one of the first public-private partnerships setup as part of Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot program. The partnership will bring IBM’s Watson for Genomics technology into the U.S. Department of Veterans Affair’s hospitals and doctors’ offices so that more former soldiers can access the best in precision medicine in the battle against cancer.
Healthcare giant McKesson is partnering with Change Healthcare on a new healthcare company with an emphasis on healthcare information technology, the two companies announced on Tuesday.
Ransomware scam artists have a good thing going. They infect some computers and inflict a distasteful—but ultimately logical—choice on the victims: Pay up or lose your data. Ransoms can be an expensive lesson for most. Many consumers opt not to pay and rely on whatever backups they have.