Connected gadgets in your home have grown increasingly connected, but healthcare is only just beginning to join this brigade. One of the biggest reasons why health professionals are reticent to connect their devices is a concern over security — for health tech, attacking a device can mean attacking a person. Hospitals have sought out ways to mitigate digital attacks, however, and legacy antivirus programs have been the mostly common route. But researchers have recently been tinkering with a new method for detecting nefarious digital actions: a program called WattsUpDoc. WattsUpDoc is a program that uses power and electricity as a means to detect if a malware has been introduced into a network.
On Tuesday, National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo told senators that health IT is "foundational" to President Obama's Precision Medicine initiative and discussed ways to improve data sharing, Health Data Management reports. In February, President Obama in his fiscal year 2016 budget proposal asked Congress for $215 million in funding for a personalized medicine initiative that centers around the creation of a massive database containing the genetic data of at least one million volunteer participants. During a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, DeSalvo said that the "comprehensive data picture" formed by analytics, electronic health records, mobile health device information and other data "is necessary to identify the right prevention and treatment that is not only the most effective, but also most desired by the patient".
Moving aggressively on several fronts, IBM announced Tuesday that it is expanding the offerings of its Watson cognitive computing platform to focus more on cloud computing initiatives, as well as on healthcare -- a market where the tech giant sees substantial opportunities. First, Watson Health will consist of about a dozen medical institutions using the Watson platform to aid genomic-based cancer treatment. Big Blue also detailed a new program that will add development partners who will contribute to the Watson platform. In addition, IBM will be offering Watson as part of a hybrid-cloud solution. The new capability is being offered through the Watson Zone on Bluemix, IBM's cloud-innovation platform.
When it comes to work, email is both a blessing and a curse. Often, it feels like managing that constant flow of electronic messages is a job unto itself. An overflowing inbox is a constant frustration for Carol Burns, chief clinical dietician at Beth Israel Deaconess in Plymouth. "It's just when you set aside time to work on a project or do something, and instead, you are reading 37 emails about things that aren't that essential." By one estimate, as much as 28% of a worker's time on the job can now be consumed by email.
Virtual reality headsets are already revolutionizing the way people experience video games: put on a pair of goggles and you can travel anywhere from outerspace to the battlefield. But gamers aren't the only ones this technology can transport to new worlds, reports CBS News' Kara Finnstrom, only on "CBS This Morning." "It's just amazing to see every little opening in the skull where a nerve goes through," said Dr. Neil Martin, chairman of University of California Los Angeles' department of neurosurgery. At UCLA, neurosurgeons are slipping on virtual reality headsets to go inside their patients' brains.
"It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change" – a quote, often attributed to Charles Darwin, (turns out it was actually a paraphrase by some accounts), but that aside, a lesson in evolutionary biology turns out to be incredibly useful in the realm of healthcare security. When examining the rapid speed at which the threat landscape for healthcare is changing and combining it with the traditionally slow-to-adapt nature of the healthcare industry in general, the problem's pretty clear. It's a different threat world nowadays.