Phishing attacks remains to be top security challenges for healthcare industry

The healthcare industry sustains to be particularly vulnerable to top security challenges, particularly phishing attacks that fool people into clicking malicious links or opening malicious documents.

That is among the findings in the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2017, which the company just issued to observe the top security challenges confronted by its clients.

In healthcare industry, two common types of attacks—SQLi and OS CMDi—combined for almost half of all attacks in the health sector. Healthcare records, IBM researchers contend, remain a top prize for cyber criminals and are immensely available on the DarkWeb market, on which compromised business records and other materials are bought and sold.

Other huge attack methods targeting healthcare involve manipulation of data structures and manipulation of system resources. “These attacks concentrate on known vulnerabilities within an application which, when victorious, can lead to complete system compromise,” report writers contend.

On average, clients monitored by IBM experienced 93 security tragedies during the year of 2016, a 48% drop from 2015. Although, that might not indicate a safer threat environment, the vendor asserts. “The reduction in attacks could mean attackers are depending more and more on proven attacks, hence requiring fewer attempts. Furthermore, the combination of massive record leaks and a record year of vulnerability disclosures also paint a different picture.”

“One positive development during the year of 2016 is that several companies now are using more secure hashing functions such as bycrypt to store passwords,” in accordance to IBM. This means that even after a breach, passwords might be more complex to crack.

The top types of attacks for monitored security clients in the year of 2016 were injection of malicious data (experienced by 42% of its clients), manipulation of data structures to gain unauthorized access (32%) and collection/analysis of information (9%). The complete IBM report is available here.

 

IBM Cognitive computing to search reasons behind eldercare problems

IBM and the companies operated by Avamere plan a 6-month research project that will apply the power of IBM cognitive computing to assist caregivers make better eldercare at senior living and health centers.
The agencies say that, by observing data streaming from sensors in senior living facilities, Avamere expects to gain insights into physical and atmospheric conditions, and acquire deeper learnings into the factors that impact thirty-day hospital readmission rates in sufferers.
Avamere is working with IBM researchers to review movement, air quality, gait analysis, usually seen as factors that generally lead to fall risk, and daily activities, involving personal hygiene, sleeping patterns, incontinence and trips to the bathroom.
IBM cognitive computing will observe this streaming sensor data to assist Avamere create and maintain a contextual understanding of its residents.
"By merging the expertise of IBM in cognitive eldercare with Avamere's knowledge of sufferers in the post-acute setting, we can gain insights that might assist transform the way individuals age in place," stated Ruoyi Zhou, director of accessibility research at IBM. "Helping Avamere uncover new insights can assist family members, caregivers, nurses and physicians recognize potential risks and better prescribe care to minimize hospital readmission."
"Smarter care management and creative population health solutions are essential to meet the ever-evolving requirements of our seniors," claims John W. Morgan, CEO of Avamere.
Infinity Rehab, which gives physical, occupational and speech therapy to Avamere patients and residents, has already taken measures to integrate data collection and analysis into existing modalities to standardize therapies across the whole company. By integrating extra data sources, like sensors, Infinity Rehab and Avamere expect to make better patient outcomes, increase efficiencies, and decrease cost to payers.

FDA, IBM Watson Health partners to investigate application of blockchain technology

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and IBM Watson Health are establishing a partnership to examine potential ways that blockchain technology can be utilized in healthcare.

The agency and IBM subsidiary have signed a 2-year contract that will enable them to jointly investigate ways to use the emerging technology. Initial attempts will concentrate on oncology-related data.

Proponents of blockchain technology consider that it could have wide applicability in healthcare. It enables the collection of information from a variety of sources, and keeps an audit trail of transactions, thus developing accountability and transparency in the data exchange procedure.

The FDA and IBM Watson Health will look at ways blockchain technology can enable healthcare entities to work together with more trust. They consider the technology can support the exchange of “owner-mediated data from various sources,” like electronic health records (EHRs), clinical trials, genomic data and information collected from presently untapped information sources, like mobile devices, wearable’s and Internet of Thing devices.

Initial attempts of the partners will focus on how a blockchain framework can help public health efforts.

“One aspect of the role of FDA as a regulatory science agency is to conduct research that informs the development of latest tools, standards, and approaches to assess the safety, efficacy, quality, and performance of all FDA-regulated products,” claimed Sean Khozin, MD, senior medical officer, Office of hematology and oncology products, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA. “By studying blockchain technology, the FDA is investing to the advancement of clinical research by testing novel frameworks for protective exchange of worthy patient-level health data at scale.”

It is this wider view of patient data that will help researchers in making better research initiatives, states Shahram Ebadollahi, vice president for innovations and chief science officer for IBM Watson Health.

“One of the problems in research is the availability of a longitudinal record of patient information that gives a 360 degree view of the patient,” Ebadollahi claims. “There is been no central place to put the data. Blockchain provides the chance to produce value and outcomes on the distributed ledger, interoperability, privacy and security, while putting the sufferer in the center.

The initiative will be constructed on IBM’s work in establishing and advancing blockchain technology, Ebadollahi adds. For instance, IBM is a founding member and key contributor to the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger project, a key underpinning for blockchain.

Under the research contract, the FDA will work straightly with IBM Watson Health. It will leverage the agency’s technical and organizational resources from its Information Exchange and Data Transformation (INFORMED) initiative. “That is an FDA big data initiative created to support novel scientific research using huge clinical trial datasets and emerging pipelines of data from sources like electronic medical record systems, biometric monitoring devices and wearable technologies,” Khozin asserts.

IBM Watson Health and the FDA plan to share earlier or initial research findings by the end of 2017 year, he adds.

The federal agency observes a variety of potential benefits from inquiring how blockchain could be used in healthcare and focusing efforts on indicating its value in specific use cases, Khozin adds.

“Huge amounts of patient data are generated in the public health sector,” he notes. “This data has the potential to assist researchers to develop more effective and safer treatments for sufferers, particularly in life-threatening disease areas such as cancer, which has observed a huge rise in the use of personalized and targeted therapies for disease treatment.

“Blockchain technology has the potential to support secure exchange of huge volumes of data while ensuring sufferer privacy and maintaining data integrity,” he adds. “These are crucial features of a scalable data exchange ecosystem that can support high-quality research while protecting against breaches of sensitive patient-level information.”

The initiative offers IBM and its Watson Health division a chance to demonstrate whether blockchain can live up to the hype that is growing around its potential to meet vexing problems in healthcare IT.

As the promise of blockchain in healthcare becomes more obvious, IBM will work to define and develop the technological solution for a scalable and decentralized information sharing ecosystem, Ebadollahi says.

“The healthcare industry is undergoing important modifications because of the vast amounts of disparate data being generated. Blockchain technology gives a greatly secure, decentralized framework for information sharing that will accelerate innovation throughout the industry,” he claims.

The initial focus on oncology with the FDA makes sense because it is “a domain to test the technology and observe how it maps to several use cases,” he further adds. “We are looking to build a patient-mediated electronic health data exchange. There are several reasons for doing this, chief among them the problem of trust—can you put faith in the data you are looking at. With blockchain, we feel it can be a remedy for that.

“We are very excited about this, and there is no better partner for us than the FDA,” Ebadollahi claims. “They know about our information of blockchain, and this offers us a matter of mutual interest from which the public can gain benefit.”

 

DNA sequencing firm partners with big HIT players

Illumina, a key vendor of DNA sequencing firm to enable clinicians and researchers to read and comprehend genetic variations, is partnering with IBM and Philips in separate genomic research projects.

IBM will integrate its Watson for Genomics decision support product, deployed on technology from Quest Diagnostics, with solid tumor profiling panel of Illumina that can depict a set of variants across 170 different kinds of genes to assist in development of personalized treatment options for cancer sufferers.

This will speed a procedure that generally now takes about a week to complete. The challenge in genomic testing is the expertise needed to give interpretation services, claims Rob Merkel, vice president of oncology and genomics at IBM Watson Health, and Watson can do the process in about 5 minutes.

“Illumina, the DNA sequencing firm, will integrate our interpretations into its latest 170-gene panel,” Merkel states. “When you sequence a tumor against healthy tissue, you can observe variations between healthy tissue and the tumor by comparing the DNA side by side.”

To do this, Watson compares the DNA to develop molecular profile analyses to recognize aberrations causing the tumor, establish biological pathways of the tumor and conduct drug analyses, all to verify what medicines and/or clinical trials are best suitable for the sufferer.

In its agreement with Philips, Illumina will integrate its DNA sequencing with Philips’ cloud-based genomics platform to support the acquisition, analysis and interpretation of genomics information during cancer research.

Both agencies are seeking U.S. healthcare systems to work with them in establishing oncology precision medicine programs. Participating researchers will have approach to advanced analytics, thorough learning technologies and a range of reference materials.

The aim is to seek new ways to quickly and precisely interpret genomic findings in the context of a sufferer’s condition, in accordance to Philips.

“While cancer sufferers can have hundreds of gene variants in their tumors, merely a small number might really drive the individual’s specific cancer or might have actionable therapeutic implications for a specific patient. The sufferer’s history, related lab tests and cancer type are required for a meaningful interpretation of the genomic data,” a Philips spokesman points out.

 

HIT: IBM, Cleveland Clinic announces 5-year Agreement

Sustaining their decades-long relationship, the Cleveland Clinic and IBM have declared a 5-year compliance to expand the health IT capabilities of Clinics, involving the utilization of IBM’s secured cloud, mobile, social and Watson cognitive computing technologies across its clinical and administrative operations. IBM, Cleveland Clinic announces 5-year Agreement for establishing HIT.

Few of the aims of the cooperation involve developing a model for the transition of healthcare system to value-based care and population health, as well as disclosing potential standards that could be replicated by providers nationwide. IBM, Cleveland Clinic announces 5-year Agreement for establishing HIT.

“As the healthcare industry rises increasingly dependent on technology to deliver effective, high-quality and affordable care, the latest technology execution is created to enable efficient analysis of information from electronic health records (EHRs), information from administrative claims and social determinants of health, permitting for both personalized clinical care and broader population-focused management,” in accordance to the declaration from both agencies.

The Cleveland Clinic was an early adopter of the Epic EHR system, in accordance to Doug Smith, the agency’s interim chief information officer, who points out that the agreement with IBM will better capture the value of this data and modify patient care across its 9 regional hospitals and eighteen full-service family health centers. IBM, Cleveland Clinic announces 5-year Agreement for establishing HIT.

In accordance to Smith, “Predictive analytics and population health at the point of care is incredibly significant for how we’ll deliver care in the future. Analytics, cognitive computing, and advanced capabilities will enable us to give quality, affordable care.”

The cognitive computing capabilities of IBM’s Watson supercomputer have been a specific place of focus between Big Blue and the Cleveland Clinic over the last 5 years:

• 2011—After Watson’s victorious debut on Jeopardy!, IBM and Cleveland Clinic merged with forces to train the technology to “think” just like a doctor.


• 2013—IBM Research started a continual collaboration with Cleveland Clinic faculty, physicians and students to establish a Watson EHR assistant to assist physicians to quickly summarize and cull relevant insights from electronic health records.


• 2014—Cleveland Clinic started its pilot of Watson for Genomics to help its research into new cancer treatments deployed on a genetic makeup of patients. Cleveland Clinic sustains to use the technology for genomic interpretation.


• 2014—Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University declared that IBM Watson would play an important role as a tool to assist students observe symptoms deployed on evidence-based insights instead of rote memorization. The cognitive technology will become a significant part of a new $515 million Health Education Campus opening in the year of 2019.

“For the last 5 years, Cleveland Clinic has been vital to IBM’s effort to construct Watson’s cognitive capabilities in healthcare,” stated Deborah DiSanzo, general manager of IBM Watson Health. “Together, we’ll bring cognitive computing and a complete portfolio of IBM technology offerings to modify clinical care and administrative operations across the Cleveland Clinic, and assist its famous care providers deliver evidence-based, personalized and cognitive care to the individual sufferers they serve and the populations they handle.”

Additionally, Smith points to IBM’s 2015 acquisition of Explorys, a population health analytics vendor, which was established by Cleveland Clinic physicians and information technology experts before becoming a spin-off company in the year of 2009—as an instance of the technological cross-pollination between the 2 agencies. IBM, Cleveland Clinic announces 5-year Agreement for establishing HIT.

“It is been a mutually beneficial relationship. We are developing value for each other,” summarizes Smith. “That is the type of partnership it has been, and it’ll continue. The sky’s the limit.”

 

Siemens steps into key population health with IBM

Siemens Healthineers is entering into the key population health with IBM. Siemens Healthineers is entering the population health management market through a partnership with IBM.

The move comes over 2 years after Cerner gained the hospital information systems business line of Siemens Healthcare, while leaving medical imaging and diagnostic laboratories as Siemens’ primary business in the United States of America, with the name replaced and changed to Siemens Healthineers. Siemens Healthineers is stepping into the population health with IBM.

Now, IBM’s Watson Care Manager population health management suite of software and services will be sold by Siemens, as well as providing consulting services.

“We’re at an unprecedented time period in healthcare,” Deborah DiSan zo, general manager for IBM Watson Health, claims. “Mature and developing markets are immensely concentrated on how sufferer results are optimized, quality is standardized among individuals and across populations, and costs are decreased. Siemens and IBM are perfect partners to work at the forefront of this evolution and evaluate personalized healthcare in the United States of America and internationally.”

Watson Care Manager is a population health management system which is utilizing Apple apps to enable clients to gather and share information with clinicians to support patient engagement. Leveraging IBM’s acquisitions of care management vendor Phytel and population health analytics vendor Explorys, Watson Care Manager in the year of 2015 held data on ninety million lives.

Utilizing Apple HealthKit, information and data can be shifted from a device to a cloud application. Using Apple ResearchKit, contributors can better manage the signing up of sufferers for clinical trials. In total, Care Manager supports development of personalized patient engagement programs to make better the individual results, the companies claim.

Executives from both IBM and Siemens are also planning to co-develop latest population health management tools.

 

Why the cybercriminals attack the healthcare sector more than any other industry

Cybercriminals attacked the healthcare industry at a greater amount than any other sector in the year 2015, and more than 100 million healthcare records were compromised previous year, in accordance to a new report published by IBM.

In fact, the year 2015 was “the year of the healthcare breach,” IBM stated in its 2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index.

The rate of attacks against the healthcare sector climbed to the largest level of all industries studied in the year 2015, after not making the top five in the year 2014, as healthcare leaped ahead of the manufacturing, financial services, government and transportation industries.

Data breaches in the healthcare sector are also getting greater – with five of the eight largest health data breaches reported since the year 2010 (those with more than 1 million records compromised) occurring in the first 6 months of the year 2015, IBM’s report said.

And the cost of data breaches is going up, specifically in healthcare, in accordance IBM’s 2015 Cost of a Data Breach study.

Healthcare In Top Spot For Various Data Violations

Healthcare saw the largest volume of data violations in 2015but, while malicious actors still hold an advantage, progress is being made according to IBM X-Force’s 2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index. The yearly report reviews events of 2015 based on IBM Security Services’ operational and investigative data of billions of security events across more than 1,000 industries in 100 countries to give an interesting snapshot into the security “arms race” between adversaries and defenders.

The fact healthcare was thrust into the top spot for 2015 should be no surprise, offered IBM dubbed 2015 “The Year of the Healthcare Breach.”The 2016 IBM X-Force Cyber Security Intelligence Index offers a high-level overview of the huge threats to IBM client worldwide over the last year, giving a detailed look at the volume of attacks, the industries most affected, the most prevalent kinds of attacks and attackers, and the primary factors enabling them. Among the highlights of the report:

• Retail Drops Out Of Top 5; Industry Targets Shift
  Healthcare shifted into 1^st place as the most-attacked industry in the year 2015, followed by manufacturing, financial services, government, and transportation. Five of the eight greatest healthcare security breaches since the year 2010 occurred during the first six months of the year 2015, and over 100 million healthcare records were compromised in the year 2015.


• Extortion On The Rise
  The various breaches in the financial services industry that included extortion tactics or theft of currency rose by 80% in 2015, but ransomware is not limited to attacks on financial institutions as the recent attacks on Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital and others demonstrate.


• Analytics Significantly Decreased False Positives
  Better tools, tuning, and analytics are improving signal-to-noise ratio and sharpening focus. The mass of security events an average organization has to deal with dropped 35% from 81 million to 53 million yearly. At the similar time, our average client company experienced 1,157 attacks in the year 2015, down 90% from 12,017 the year before.


• Security Incidents Increased 64 Percent
  There were 178 security tragedies (the most serious of the three, requiring deeper investigation) in 2015, up 66% from 109 in the year 2014.


• Insiders Are Still A Big Problem
  60% (up from 55 percent) of attacks were initiated by insiders, of those 33% were carried out by inadvertent actors (down from 50 percent in 2014) A sign of change in worker education and security policies.

IBM's Latest Healthcare Acquisition May Not Happen

Summary

• Regulators, courts and privacy advocates should take a close glance at the intended IBM purchase of Truven because it consolidates the greatest repository of healthcare data anywhere.


• How the information will be utilized and safeguarded from cyber breaches is a primary question.


• The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the day of March 1 against Vermont's gathering of data from insurance policies.


• IBM may be making an oligopoly of healthcare data that will inhibit competition.

Investors should temper their enthusiasm about IBM's deal to achieve Truven Health Analytics until regulatory approvals are secured. IBM is no stranger to antitrust laws, which are meant to stop the consolidation of firms into oligopolies. While antitrust regulators have not vigorously enforced these laws during recent administrations, IBM's acquisition of Truven merits a close look not merely by regulators at the Federal Trade Commission, but also by courts and privacy advocates concerned with the security of healthcare data.

Cerner, Epic, IBM, Verily, others sign on for Precision Medicine Initiative of Obama

Cerner stated on the day of Thursday that it will pilot an open standardized application as part of the Sync for Science project within President Barack Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative. And it was merely 1 of the various health IT vendors that hopped on board precision medicine during the President’s Summit.

Driven by the National Institutes of Health and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Sync for Science is a primary component of the Precision Medicine Initiative in that it targets to recruit 1 million volunteers for a nationwide research project by the year 2019 – an attempt NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, described as "the greatest, most ambitious research project of this sort ever undertaken."

Indeed, a veritable all-star cast of health IT vendors and agencies are included in the project involving Allscripts, athenahealth, drchrono, Epic and Mckesson, as well as as IBM, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Google’s Verily unit.

IBM, for its part, will join the New York Genome Center to establish an open cancer data repository, leveraging data from Watson to develop new insights into cancer research and personalize treatments through genomic data analysis.

HIT Think Time to reconsider your access to the security budgeting

With approximately 100 million healthcare records compromised in merely the 1^st half of last year, IBM called 2015 the year of the healthcare security violation in a latest Security Trends in the Healthcare Industry report.

This report demonstrates that high economical gain is 1 factor pursuing attackers to the healthcare sector. Another reason is the numerous attack vectors present through the healthcare industry’s widespread utilization of legacy networks and dated technology which increases the likelihood for victorious proven and reliable attack strategies.

Few healthcare security budgets are growing at a modest pace in accordance to Forrester; 16 percent of the information technology budget compared with 19 percent across all industries. Although, there are yet various other healthcare security budgets that seem to get trivial increases, and, in certain cases, a reduction in security-related expenditures. Rises in the accompanying chart are not astonishingly large.

This is clearly counterintuitive, since threats and security hopes are not reducing, but are becoming importantly higher. The key to meeting these conflicting demands is rising the efficiency of addressing with more routine security functions and utilizing some of the resulting savings to address with new threats and complicated technology atmospheres within a process-oriented framework for data risk management.

In accordance to Forrester, nearly 30 percent of the healthcare security budget contains staffing and maintenance prices with staffing representing approximately 14 percent and maintenance of existing on-premises security technology representing almost 15 percent. But scarce security qualities in the labor pool are continual challenges for entire healthcare agencies. This not merely raises the price of staffing but also limits efficiency.

To decrease both staffing and maintenance prices, Forrester suggests that healthcare agencies consider increasing the adoption and acceptance of managed security or security-as-a-service. They assert that security is a serious and complex function, but not all of it requires to be delivered in-house.

The similar profits that empower agencies to move other workloads to the cloud apply to security like scalability, flexibility and a decrease of capital expenditure. With constrained resources and growing security demands, healthcare agencies require spending more rationally while getting better at managing data risk by operationalizing routine data security functions.

The healthcare industry is progressing and evolving rapidly and reacting to more demanding sufferer expectations. With the pace of change putting more pressure on healthcare agencies, building in-house abilities to monitor and handle security around the clock is becoming an unrealistic choice for many.

There are various mature and repetitive security functions that can be outsourced to handled security services or the cloud. Security data and event monitoring, reporting and threat intelligence are powerful candidates for outsourcing as long as you keep decision-making duties in-house. Consider the period that such mundane operational activities take and how much value you could acquire by having internal staff working on more serious problems instead. This can really make better the security and lower costs but can also decrease spending and head count, specifically since most healthcare agencies need 24/7 coverage.

Among 621 data violations studied in the 2013 Data Breach Investigation Report by Verizon, nearly 70% of breaches were founded by external parties vs. 9% by consumers.

Gone are the days when healthcare agencies could handle all of its data risks alone. As healthcare atmospheres become more complicated and threats grow, agencies can find themselves struggling to policy and implement effective security programs which is a situation exacerbated by a deficiency of accurately skilled or trained staff.

Security spending in the healthcare organization can vary widely, as does the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of that spending. Healthcare agencies can instruct their budgets for optimal results by considering through and answering the kinds of functions and tasks that it should own and the staff qualities to hire vs. outsource.

They should evaluate decisions about what security functions it should own by how any provided activity supports its primary goal of information protection. The move to real information risk management needs healthcare agencies to reconsider its approach to budgeting.

EMRs, PHRs, HIE necessary to support patient-centered medical home

By Neil Versel

Without EMRs, PHRs and health information exchange, the patient-centered medical home may not be bound to fail, but it certainly is difficult to establish and maintain. “IT is really the key to supporting the doctor/patient relationship and making it more efficient, safer and more effective,” Dr. Paul Grundy, president of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, tells Health Data Management. The Washington-based organization advocates the medical home, under which a primary-care physician manages and coordinates care on behalf of patients, with an eye toward prevention and management of chronic diseases.

It may be a challenge to implement the medical-home model under current reimbursement systems, but until payers start rewarding physicians for keeping patients healthy, IT may be the best avenue. EMRs with clinical decision support, PHRs that help patients monitor their own conditions and health information exchange to support care coordination all can help establish a team approach to care and treatment, HDM reports.

“This is simply about restructuring the way healthcare is delivered to catch the efficiency of technology,” adds Grundy, who also is director of heathcare transformation at IBM.

Above article published on http://www.fierceemr.com/story/emrs-phrs-hie-necessary-support-patient-centered-medical-home/2009-11-12