For years, scientists have been struggling with the problem of “protein folding” – mapping the three-dimensional shapes of the proteins that are responsible for diseases from cancer to Covid-19. Google's Deepmind claims to have created an artificially intelligent program called "AlphaFold" that is able to solve those problems in a matter of days.
It has been nearly a month since the cyberattack on the UVM Health Network. It seriously impacted operations at the six hospitals within the network but hit the UVM Medical Center the hardest. However, progress continues to be made and systems restored. Leaders at the UVM Medical Center say their IT experts have been able to restore the electronic medical record system and call the progress a big step toward getting back to normal.
For most of 2020, Chris, a father of three in Chicago, couldn’t leave his apartment: not to go for a walk, not to run errands, and not to take his son to the doctor when he broke his arm. And not because of quarantine. If Chris even stepped outside his front door without getting permission from authorities—a process that could take weeks—then the electronic monitor strapped to his ankle would notify law enforcement, possibly landing him in jail.
Griffin Hospital is the indirect victim of a ransomware attack, with its website going offline this week but patient information not exposed, officials said. The attack is being directed against Managed.com, which administers the Derby hospital’s website. In ransomware attacks, hackers encrypt data and demand payment in an untraceable cryptocurrency as a condition to restoring access. The breaches often occur in “phishing” emails sent to an individual employee to dupe them into clicking on a link that installs the ransomware software and takes a system hostage.
Some patients can get care in the comfort of their home, but traditional Medicare and most private health plans don’t cover it—though some insurers are getting interested
As the United States braces for a bleak winter, hospital systems across the country are ramping up their efforts to develop AI systems to predict how likely their Covid-19 patients are to fall severely ill or even die. Yet most of the efforts are being developed in silos and trained on limited datasets, raising crucial questions about their reliability.