AI adoption is fast outpacing governance, and with memories (or nightmares) of EMR adoption and the Change Healthcare outage on everyone’s mind, the pressure is on to set up guardrails
With HIMSS24 in the rear-view mirror, one of the biggest takeaways from the conference was the energy and attendance. Healthcare’s movers and shakers were here, at least for a day or two, and they were making deals and forging partnerships.
And while AI tools and programs were dominating the discussion and deals, a lot of talk was centered on Ai accountability.
While the year-old Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) made early news with its announcement of advisory boards and partnerships, Microsoft unveiled its own Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), an intriguing collaboration of health systems and federal representatives that aims to create more structure in the move toward governance.
“When it comes to AI’s tremendous capabilities, there is no doubt the technology has the potential to transform healthcare. However, the processes for implementing the technology responsibly are just as vital,” David Rhew, MD, Microsoft’s global chief medical officer and vice president of healthcare, said in a press release. “By working together, TRAIN members aim to establish best practices for operationalizing responsible AI, helping improve patient outcomes and safety while fostering trust in healthcare AI.”
Rhew also commented on LinkedIn on how CHAI and TRAIN will co-exist.
“One way to look at it is that CHAI focuses on ‘the what,’” he wrote. “What is responsible AI (RAI)? What are the RAI principles and standards? ... while TRAIN focuses on ‘the how.’ How does one operationalize RAI? How can organizations collaborate in a privacy-preserving manner, such that data and IP are not exposed? How can we ensure that low-resource settings are able to apply RAI?
Simply put, CHAI helps develop the RAI standards, while TRAIN helps organizations implement them, through the use of technology-based RAI tools and guardrails.”
That post hints at the understanding that while everyone agrees the industry needs guardrails, how we get there will be a challenge. And with all the announcements and talk at HIMSS24 of health systems and hospitals launching AI programs, the urgency to create standards is growing by the day.
Many also don’t want the process to mirror EMR adoption two decades ago. The healthcare industry wasn’t prepared to embrace electronic medical records, leading to more than a few nightmares in implementation and the need for meaningful use guidelines. Now AI adoption is fast outpacing governance, and executives are in some ways nostalgic for the guidance offered by meaningful use.
Add to that the concern around the recent Change Healthcare cybersecurity attack some three weeks ago. The outage filtered into many a conversation at HIMSS24, creating a stir around the section of the exhibit hall given over to cybersecurity companies. While the incident has been tied back to a ransomware gang, more than a few people have wondered whether unchecked use of AI could lead to more data breaches – or whether AI could be used as a tool against attacks.
For example, Nordic Consulting announced at HIMSS24 a partnership with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to launch a Cloud Innovation Lab, addressing requests from healthcare organizations for help in expanding and managing their data storage capabilities, in part because of the increase in AI programs. Brijeet Akula, a Principal Architect at Nordic Consulting, said company was seeing a lot of business from hospitals and health systems spooked by the outage.
“They have sped up their desire to explore more security methods,” he noted.
So while security may be an outlier, it will add to the urgency to create guardrails around AI. The Biden Administration has set its course with an October 2023 Executive Order on AI and announcements of actions to come, but CHAI and TRAIN offer proof that there will be more players in the game.
Like CHAI, TRAIN has an impressive (and in some cases overlapping) roster. Along with healthcare technology company TrueBridge, participating health systems include AdventHealth, Advocate Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, Duke Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Mass General Brigham, MedStar Health, Mercy, Mount Sinai Health System, Northwestern Medicine, Providence, Sharp HealthCare, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and the organization will be working with OCHIN, a non-profit innovation center with strong ties to Epic.
So even as these organizations are deploying AI in several, if not hundreds, of use cases, the talk in the background is around setting up accountability as soon as possible—especially before those use cases start involving patients.
“Even the best healthcare today still suffers from many challenges that AI-driven solutions can substantially improve,” Peter J. Embí, MD, MS, a professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) and senior vice president for research and innovation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said in the press release.”However, just as we wouldn’t think of treating patients with a new drug or device without ensuring and monitoring their efficacy and safety, we must test and monitor AI-derived models and algorithms before and after they are deployed across diverse healthcare settings and populations, to help minimize and prevent unintended harms. It is imperative that we work together and share tools and capabilities that enable systematic AI evaluation, surveillance and algorithm vigilance for the safe, effective and equitable use of AI in healthcare.”
CNOs must bridge generational gaps to maintain a strong workforce.
The biggest challenge facing CNOs these days is the workforce shortage. Not only are there not enough nurses entering the industry, but there are also many tenured nurses who are leaving the profession or retiring and taking their knowledge with them.
CNOs must implement creative solutions to recruit and retain nurses of all generations who will continue providing the best standard of care to patients.
Here's what CNOs need to know about connecting the generations in nursing, according to Cassie Lewis, chief nursing officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health, and Gail Vozzella, senior vice president and chief nurse executive at Houston Methodist.
A HIMSS24 panel discusses how competition and uncertain reimbursements are forcing providers to change their business model
Healthcare providers are starting to rethink what being a provider actually means.
Stung by high costs and low reimbursements for acute care, some health systems are shifting their sights to care management and preventive care. And they’re making patient engagement a priority.
“A great deal of our future is in the outpatient side,” Tressa Springman, SVP and chief information and digital officer at LifeBridge Health, a five-hospital system based in Maryland, said during a panel session Tuesday at HIMSS 24.
She noted that more than 50% of the health system’s quality-based reimbursement score for the state is focused on the patient experience, making that more important than actual clinical care. So they’re now setting their sights on access, convenience, and outpatient interactions.
“We’re really focusing on the community,” she said.
Indeed, smaller health systems and hospitals are being forced to change their priorities just to stay in business. Rural hospitals are shutting down or shifting to emergency care centers. Others are closing their Eds and ICUs, referring patients to stand-alone urgent care centers, and looking more closely at a concierge care strategy.
The HIMSS24 panel, titled “Moving Beyond EHR Engagement: Deploy Consumer-Centric Strategies That Truly Empower Communities,” took a closer look at how providers are making engagement work. They’re listening more to their patients, embracing remote patient monitoring, virtual care, wearables and home-based services, and targeting care management and coordination.
“We want to know more about our patients,” said Eric Alper, MD, vice president, chief quality officer and chief clinical informatics officer at UMass Memorial Health. “The Joint Commission and CMS are actually [demanding] it.”
This strategy isn’t without its challenges. As the title of the session implies, a lot of the information providers need isn’t found in the EHR, and so health systems and hospitals are investing in bolt-on technologies and programs, weaving care in and out of the medical record. They’re paying more attention to social determinants of health (SDOH), and fashioning programs that revolve around the patient’s preferences and needs.
Michael Garcia, vice president and chief information officer at the Miami-based Jackson Health System, noted that his health system is making more of an effort to tailor healthcare to patients who typically have trouble accessing care. At Jackson Health, that includes significant numbers of homeless people, undocumented immigrants, and people who are either incarcerated or recently released from prison.
That strategy is based on necessity. If the health system doesn’t reach out and provide care when and where they need it, he said, those patients will end up in Jackson Health’s already-overcrowded Emergency Department.
All three panelists and their moderator, GetWellNetwork founder and CEO Michael O’Neil, noted that this type of strategy doesn’t have a gameplan or model to work from, and no one has come up with any best practices yet. Providers are on their own in developing these care pathways, and in many cases each is developing a unique strategy.
Then again, today’s consumers aren’t looking for a cookie-cutter approach to engagement.
“The ordinary person doesn’t care how much scale you have in your organization,” O’Neil pointed out.
Springman noted that disruptors are making the primary care space very competitive, and it’s difficult for providers to match what Amazon, Walmart, and others are offering. Somewhat ironically, that’s forcing providers to re-engage with their patients, establishing new relationships that technology has for the past few years interrupted.
“We actually are investing much more in well care than in sick care,” she said.
These nurse leaders outline best recruiting and retention practices for CNOs.
The biggest challenge facing CNOs these days is the workforce shortage. Not only are there not enough nurses entering the industry, but there are also many tenured nurses who are leaving the profession or retiring and taking their knowledge with them.
CNOs must implement creative solutions to recruit and retain nurses of all generations who will continue providing the best standard of care to patients.
During the recent HealthLeaders’ Nurse Labor and Compensation NOW Summit, Cassie Lewis, chief nursing officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health, and Gail Vozzella, senior vice president and chief nurse executive at Houston Methodist, spoke about strategies to retain tenured nurses, and how CNOs can help transition the knowledge of tenured nurses to new graduate nurses.
Connecting the generations
There are major differences in expectations between Traditionalists, baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z in the workforce. Life circumstances and work-life balance needs are different, some nurses might have children or elderly adults they need to care for, while others are younger and able to work at varying times during the week.
Due to the stressful nature of nursing and current workforce challenges, there are tenured nurses who are leaving the profession entirely and taking their knowledge with them.
CNOs need to strategize ways to keep the knowledge within industry, so that new graduate nurses can learn from them.
“Our environments are really physically and mentally demanding,” Vozzella said, “so what options can we give to somebody who’s at the end of their career?”
Flexibility
One strategy that CNOs should use is to sit down with tenured nurses before they decide to leave the workforce and ask them where they want their career to be in the next three to five years, Vozzella explained. Providing individualized flexibility is key and will keep tenured nurses working at the bedside longer.
“If a more tenured nurse wants to be off all summer, it would be better for us if we allowed that,” Vozzella said, “in order to keep that person working in an intensive care unit or an operating room for five more years.”
CNOs also need to make sure that tenured nurses feel valued. Lewis recommended taking a look at what offerings are being given to incoming nurses, and how that can be balanced with offerings for tenured nurses.
“When you go online, sign on bonuses are exponentially large in some areas, the compression factor is real,” Lewis said. “[We need to ensure] our tenured nurses feel the same value because we don’t want them to feel left behind.”
Compensation is not the only factor, the position of a tenured nurse could become hybrid, where half of their work is at the bedside and half is in a faculty position, Lewis suggested.
“There’s benefit to saying it’s not just monetary compensation,” Lewis said, “but we’re willing to work with you to create some level of flexibility that meets you where you’re at.”
Virtual nursing
One of the best options for keeping tenured nurses in the workforce longer is virtual nursing, according to Vozzella. Virtual nursing would retain the knowledge of tenured nurses and provide new nurses with support so that they feel less isolated.
“[The tenured nurses wouldn’t be] walking as much, but they could continue to speak to patients or…mentor new nurses that are starting out [while] not having to do such a structured 12-hour shift,” Vozzella said. “They could do it for four hours, [or] they could do it from home.”
Lewis agreed, adding that generally having more creative positions in nursing is how to keep tenured nurses from leaving the workforce. Virtual nursing creates opportunities for nurses to do virtual admissions and remote patient monitoring, which would keep tenured nurses from exclusively having to work at the bedside.
Mentorship opportunities
Another way to keep knowledge within the industry is to provide tenured nurses with opportunities to mentor incoming nurses. According to Lewis, one way to do this is to keep an expert or a tenured nurse on call, so that newer nurses can reach out if they need help with something.
“We’re starting to see [this] as a strategy [for] when we can’t get [tenured nurses] at the bedside,” Lewis said, “[and] how [we can] take that knowledge and really use it to help that novice nurse become safer in their practice and feel more confident.”
Lewis also recommended a nurse emeritus program, where seasoned nurses who are close to retirement can mentor newer nurses or even nurse leaders. Volunteer programs or nurse faculty positions are also helpful options since many nurses who leave want to stay connected to their patients.
“Our nurses really do feel connection and callings to do the things that we do every day,” Lewis said, “and so the more we can meet them where they’re at to share that collective knowledge, they’re willing to do it.”
This is part two of a two-part piece, part one was published Monday, March 11th.
In this episode of the HealthLeaders Podcast, we're joined by Monica Richey, VP of Physician Revenue Cycle for Grady Health System in Atlanta, Georgia. Throughout our conversation, we'll be...
As the annual conference and exhibition opens this week in Orlando, healthcare executives are looking anxious for some good news, or at least positive ROI
The healthcare industry is in a rough spot right now, buffeted by cybersecurity issues, disruptors with big dreams, workforce declines, labor unrest, mangled mergers and closures. As the annual HIMSS conference convenes in Orlando this week, a lot of people are looking for some good news. We’re at that point in Marcus Welby, MD, or Emergency or St. Elsewhere or ER or Grey’s Anatomy or House or Chicago whatever that the patient is on life support and everyone’s just sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike,
Might AI be that shining moment? Could VR save the day? How about FHIR? Perhaps.
As the camera pans out and HIMSS24 steps into focus, here are a few thoughts on what we’ll be seeing and talking about this week in the land of Disney.
AI comes of age. As this week’s flurry of announcements can attest, healthcare organizations are turning AI loose on some of the industry’s most vexing pain points. The HIMSS agenda is filled with sessions detailing how health systems are using the technology, and a casual walk around the exhibit hall will unveil plenty of vendors armed with use cases and examples of ROI.
Indeed, many of the press releases coming out this week are focusing on new partnerships or capabilities around AI. Providers are collaborating with their EHR providers and digital health companies to move data through the platform more efficiently, giving doctors and nurses what they need at the point of care to improve their work and, ultimately, their work-life balance.
The most popular use case at present is the development of ambient AI tools to capture conversations and convert them to clinical notes. Healthcare executives are eager to see how the technology can take documentation and data entry out of the clinician’s hands, which not only gives the doctor or nurse more time to spend in front of patients but reduces the tasks that cause stress and eat into home and family time. But this isn’t the only example of how the technology is being used, and savvy decision-makers will be looking beyond the obvious to find other use cases that help struggling hospitals improve workflows and reduce cost.
A looming battle over value? While AI use cases are all the rage, there’s plenty of talk about how the technology will be governed. The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) made news recently with the announcement of several advisory boards and a couple of collaborations aimed at creating guidelines for the ethical use of AI, but that news caused more than a few critics to wonder how a struggling health system might weigh the financial value of an AI tool against its potential to boost clinical outcomes.
The argument isn’t new to healthcare, especially as the industry tries to wrap its arms around value-based care. But the speed at which AI has moved into the healthcare ecosystem is putting pressure on health systems to take a closer look at what the “ethical use of AI’ really means. Can the industry find a common ground on which to measure value? Will recent stories around the use of AI by payers to sort and deny claims be enough of a warning sign to spur meaningful conversation? And will the industry work with the federal government to set the guardrails?
The Change Healthcare ransomware attack is having an impact. As expected, the ongoing cybersecurity attack on UnitedHealth Group’s IT platform is affecting both attendance and conversations. Some health system executives are shortening or cancelling their plans to be in Orlando to deal with the outage, while cybersecurity vendors are using the outage as a conversation starter.
The outage has elevated the “workaround” to a common topic of conversation, as beleaguered healthcare providers look for alternate strategies to keep the doors open in the wake of delayed payments. It has also forced many executives to take a closer look not only at their internal and vendor security protocols, but their cash-on-hand strategies. In fact, healthcare organizations seem more focused on how they can weather the next big cybersecurity incident than on how to prevent it.
This will be a huge topic of conversation at HIMSS. Cybersecurity incidents are occurring with such frequency in healthcare now that organizations are putting more thought into limiting the damage when something happens. And as the Change Healthcare outage proves, healthcare organizations have to plan not only for something that happens to them, but also for something that can affect a large swathe of the industry.
Setting a solid foundation. Finally, one of the bigger takeaways from ViVE was that healthcare organizations were paying more attention to how they gather, store, and manage data. That hasn’t changed in Orlando, and HIMSS’ longtime focus on interoperability will keep that conversation going. Innovation in healthcare these days is less about the new toys and more about how data is used to improve things inside and outside the hospital, clinic, or doctor’s office. From smart hospital rooms of the future that gather and funnel information wirelessly, to remote patient monitoring and hospital at home programs that create a data highway from care team to patient, to SDOH programs that mine data for healthcare challenges and barriers and create programs around addressing those challenges, the connecting concept is connectivity.
While strategies like TEFCA and FHIR aim to create a nationwide interoperability platform, providers are just as interested now in strategies and technology that can handle the data they have or want to have. They want tools to pull it in from outside the enterprise, sort it quickly and efficiently without the need for manual labor, and get it to the right people at the right place at the right time, regardless of EHR platform or HIT framework. They’re looking at more data than they’ve ever had before, and the volume or value certainly won’t decrease.
This week’s conference is more about making those connections that work, finding value in partnerships and technology that make things run easier at a time when healthcare is desperate for efficiency. So any use case this week with solid ROI will be trumpeted, as will any collaboration that “pushes the needle” on improved outcomes.
Healthcare needs some good news before the final credits roll.
On this week’s episode of HL Shorts, we hear from Betty Jo Rocchio, Senior Vice President and Chief Nurse Executive at Mercy, about how CNOs can use AI to help solve staffing issues. Tune in to hear her insights.
The tool is designed to help clinicians identify a common type of ear infection that's often overlooked or misdiagnosed
Clinicians at UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh have developed an AI algorithm that can identify acute otitis media (AOM), one of the most common childhood infections.
While some 70% of children have an ear infection before their first birthday, those infections are hard to spot and are often misdiagnosed as fluid buildup. To identify AOM, clinicians need to peer into the eardrum and identify subtle signs of an infection, often a difficult task when dealing with an infant or small child.
To help clinicians make a better diagnosis, researchers created an AI tool that can analyze a video of a patient’s eardrum, taken by an otoscope connected to a camera.
“Acute otitis media is often incorrectly diagnosed,” Alejandro Hoberman, MD, a professor of pediatrics and director of the Division of General Academic Pediatrics at Pitt’s School of Medicine and president of UPMC Children’s Community Pediatrics, said in a press release. “Underdiagnosis results in inadequate care and overdiagnosis results in unnecessary antibiotic treatment, which can compromise the effectiveness of currently available antibiotics. Our tool helps get the correct diagnosis and guide the right treatment.”
“The eardrum, or tympanic membrane, is a thin, flat piece of tissue that stretches across the ear canal,” he added. “In AOM, the eardrum bulges like a bagel, leaving a central area of depression that resembles a bagel hole. In contrast, in children with otitis media with effusion, no bulging of the tympanic membrane is present.”
Hoberman and his team created the tool by studying more than 1,100 videos of the tympanic membrane in children who had visited a doctor for treatment between 20-18 and 2023. They used the videos to develop two AI models that can detect AOM by studying the features of the tympanic membrane, including shape, position, color, and transparency.
According to Hoberman, the AI tool has a 93% success rate in identifying AOM. That’s better than various studies that have put the success rate of physicians studying a patient’s ear at between 30% and 84%.
“These findings suggest that our tool is more accurate than many clinicians,” he said in the press release. “It could be a gamechanger in primary healthcare settings to support clinicians in stringently diagnosing AOM and guiding treatment decisions.”
Healthcare organizations across the country are developing hundreds of AI tools to aid clinicians, drawing on technology that can often analyze data more efficiently than the human eye. These tools can also store the data in the EHR, enabling clinicians to review their work, show the results to parents, and use the data for training.
These nurse leaders outline best recruiting and retention practices for CNOs.
The biggest challenge facing CNOs these days is the workforce shortage. Not only are there not enough nurses entering the industry, but there are also many tenured nurses who are leaving the profession or retiring, and taking their knowledge with them.
Nursing leaders must implement creative solutions to recruit and retain nurses of all generations who will continue providing the best standard of care to patients.
During the recent HealthLeaders’ Nurse Labor and Compensation NOW Summit, Cassie Lewis, Chief Nursing Officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health, and Gail Vozzella, Senior Vice President and Chief Nurse Executive at Houston Methodist, spoke about strategies to improve nurse recruitment and retention, and how CNOs can help create and strengthen the next generation of nurses.
Challenges
Recruiting and retention challenges have always existed, but were greatly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The nursing shortage became more evident as large numbers of nurses left the industry or went to agencies, and academic pipelines were disrupted, Vozzella said.
“Rebuilding our workforces certainly led to looking closely at recruitment strategies … nationally across hospitals,” Vozzella said, “and I think it gave us the opportunity to look and see where we had clunkiness in the recruitment process.”
Lewis agreed, emphasizing how the pandemic affected the different generations of nurses in the workforce.
“We obviously are needing to recruit different skill mixes of nurses because we have the need for expert nurses or nurses with experience,” Lewis said. “But also we are seeing a lot of new graduate nurses coming into the profession.”
This, however, creates a lack of experienced nurses at the bedside.
“Trying to ensure that we are adequately training our newer graduate nurses and giving them that experience that they’re looking for…is very challenging,” Lewis said.
Additionally, nurses now hold more power over where and when they work, since there is a higher demand for them.
“The ball is in their court,” Lewis said. “They have many competing offers, [and] they have many health systems where they can go.”
“I think as chief nurses what we have to balance [alongside directors and managers] as they hire and onboard is doing it with speed,” Vozzella said, “because certainly people are getting multiple offers.”
Another challenge facing CNOs during the recruitment process is that there are five generations in the workforce, according to Vozzella. A graduating class of nurses can now include people from several age brackets, and people who are second-career nurses, and their needs are all going to be different.
“Communication is key when you’re communicating with [different] generations of nurses,” Vozzella said. “We have to be more intentional as nursing leaders and as we implement new strategies to hopefully unburden the bedside nurse of tasks that they don’t need to be doing.”
The perception of nursing on social media also plays a big role in the modern recruitment process.
“I think one of the things that has been very eye-opening is with the presence of social media,” Lewis said. “[Nurses] do talk and there are platforms now for them to talk about organizations.”
“I think we have to make sure that we have the right environment [so] that our culture speaks for who we are,” Vozzella said. “[And we must be] attentive to what is being said on social media.”
Strategies for CNOs
The solution to these challenges involves creating an environment where nurses want to work and where they feel valued and supported, both personally and professionally. This includes providing individualized experiences and the flexibility to have a work-life balance.
“One of the things that we’re seeing with these different generations of nurses is work-life balance means something different to every generation,” Lewis said.
“Even benefits packages for employees, one size no longer fits all,” Vozzella said. “At different phases of life, you need different things.”
“What could be the game changer between one organization and another is that individualized experience,” Lewis continued, “where someone really cares about you as a person and has the ability to have some level of flexibility.”
Both Vozzella and Lewis emphasized the need to strengthen academic partnerships to create strong pipelines into the industry, and the necessity of creating robust transition to practice programs.
“Having a nurse residency program has been … beneficial, because people coming out of school are [just] getting the basics in training,” Lewis said. “When [graduate nurses] are actually starting to take care of patients, they’re mind-blown at some of the things they’re encountering.”
CNOs need to make sure their nurses can come into the industry to practice nursing, rather than getting caught up in administrative tasks. According to Vozzella, this will also help with retention.
“Being called to be a nurse is very special,” Vozzella said. “We have to create an environment [where nurses] can use their calling and can help people. So that’s not typing in a medical record for 60% of your shift, that’s not hunting and gathering for supplies, or trying to find other things.”
Nursing leaders also need to be supported so that they have time to interview, recruit, and select candidates while fulfilling the rest of their responsibilities.
“[CNOs must] make sure that our recruitment teams have those strong partnerships with frontline leaders to make those selections,” Vozzella said, “and [that] we use as much technology as we can to make that a streamlined process, not just for the candidate, but also for the leader whose time is precious.”
This is part one of a two-part piece, part two will be published Wednesday, March 13th.
The recent cyberattack on Change Healthcare has brought the conversation around cybersecurity concerns to its zenith.
The ransonware attack on Change Healthcare has affected pharmacies across the country, with the industry estimated to be losing over $100 million a day. While ransomware attacks seem popular for health systems, cyberattacks are getting more sophisticated.
As always, HealthLeaders is keeping up with the latest cybersecurity and IT developments and insights. Here’s a round-up of recent articles in case you need to get caught up:
The Health and Human Services Department raised the alarm for the healthcare sector to make cybersecurity a priority at the end of 2023. The agency presented a four-step plan to improve the sector’s defenses, which include establishing voluntary cybersecurity performance goals for the sector and providing resources to incentivize and implement cybersecurity practices.
In January, the American Hospital Association released a statement alerting members of a new threat, where hackers pose as IT help desk staff to steal information from revenue cycle or financial workers, with the goal of accessing their accounts to change payment instructions to fraudulent U.S bank accounts.
When systems implement new technology, the vendor it’s working with may not have the same security standards. The race for digital expansion shows no signs of slowing down, and vendors are making their own efforts to ensure the security of their solutions, but the rate at which they evolve makes it difficult for systems security standards to keep up.
New York City’s Montefiore Medical Center must pay $4.75 million dollars to the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Civil Rights for failing to secure patient data. Investigators found that the system failed to properly monitor its electronic health records, which left it unable to stop or detect a 2013 data breach until years later.
The IT business unit of UnitedHealth was hit with a ransomware attack in late February and has affected thousands of pharmacies, resulting in a substantial loss of revenue. With the network being offline, providers have had to use alternative clearing houses to submit claims. The American Hospital Association has urged the HHS to take action and make funds and resources available to affected providers.
