Agencies more vulnerable than ever to cyber security attack

Cyber security attack vulnerability is at all-time high, and just one in five agencies can manage an attack “very well,” in accordance with new research from audit and advisory firm KPMG LLP and recruitment firm and IT outsourcing provider Harvey Nash.

Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of the 4,498 global CIOs and technology leaders that the firms surveyed between the time period of December 2016 and April 2017 are adapting their technology strategies in the midst of unprecedented global political and economic uncertainty. The proportion of agencies surveyed that now have enterprise-wide digital strategies increased 52% in just 2 years, and those agencies with a chief digital officer have increased 39% over last year, in accordance to the study. Organizations are more vulnerable than ever to cyber security attack.

To assist deliver these complex digital strategies, organizations also report a huge demand for enterprise architects—the fastest increasing technology skill this year, up 26% compared with the year of 2016.

Nearly, one third of the IT leaders (32%) reported that their agencies had been the target of a major cyber security attack in the last 24 months, a 45% increase from 2013. Just one in five (21 percent) said they are “very well” prepared to respond to these attacks, down from 29% in the year of 2014.

The biggest rise in threats comes from insider attacks, increasing from 40% to 47% over last year.

“From an organizational and cultural perspective, the CIO is now confronted with a full transformation to digital, enterprise-wide,” said Bob Miano, president and CEO at Harvey Nash. This full-scale move to a digital atmosphere is increasing data vulnerability.

“Digital is without question the CIO’s priority. But specifically for legacy organizations, leading this change to a complete, unified digital strategy is top of mind,” Miano stated.

While the fastest-growing demand for a technology skill this year was enterprise architecture, big data and analytics sustained to be the most in-demand skill, at 42%, up 8% over last year.

 

CHIME begins effort to empower diversity in HIT leadership

Those leading HIT leadership departments are leading staffs that have become more diverse, and that is increasing the requirement for expanding diversity among the execs that lead them.

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is taking on that challenge as it starts plans to establish programs that expand leadership training for females and minorities.

The agency, which represents healthcare IT executives nationwide, claims it will empower HIT leadership among females and minorities through mentorship and focused professional development.

Increased executive diversity is critical because the sufferers that healthcare agencies serve are more diverse, as are the staffs they direct, CHIME board members claim.

“The sufferer is the ultimate customer,” states Liz Johnson, CHIME’s board chair and CIO for acute care hospitals at Tenet Healthcare. “IT strategy and decision-making must include having an understanding of the diverse population that is being served.

“There is no better way to do that than to increase diversity, not merely at the HIT leadership level but entire throughout IT and from within the staffing ranks.” Johnson adds. “This will develop an atmosphere that promotes distinctive perspectives, creative approaches and opportunities to better meet the requirements of our customers and organization.”

Healthcare, like other industries, has struggled to expand leadership to females and minorities. For instance, minorities represent only 14% of hospital board members, 11% of executive leadership positions and 19% of first- and mid-level managers, in accordance to respondents to a 2015 survey from the Institute for Diversity in Health Care and the Health Research and Educational Trust.

And, previous year, an analysis by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society discovered important disparities in compensation between male and female respondents to its recent yearly surveys.

Within CHIME and its related agencies, of about 700 members who recognized race or ethnicity on their membership profile, 136 said they belong to a minority group. And about 25% of its membership is female.

It is time for CHIME to take a leadership role in the initiative because the traditional CIO role is evolving.

“We require being responsive to that,” she claims. “We require being mentoring those who are following in our footsteps. We identify that the workforce that is coming behind us has many diversity. It is just significant that we recognize that there is tremendous change occurring.”

The progress in diversity underscores the requirement for healthcare IT leaders to have new skills and HIT leadership traits, claims Myra Davis, CIO and senior vice president at Texas Childrens Hospital, and a CHIME board member.

“As the healthcare IT atmosphere continues to evolve, it mentions a requirement for competencies in areas that we did not have in the past,” Davis says. “We need to promote opportunities to increase awareness that anyone, of any background, can be a leader. We’ve a chance, as CHIME board members and leaders in our field, to promote that change.”

Cletis Earle, vice president and CIO at Kaleida Health and a CHIME board member, agrees that the CHIME initiative is timely and sorely required.

“When you’ve a diverse culture, you require a more dynamic workforce to have different ideas and thought procedures,” Earle states. “As an African American, there’s not a lot of folks who look like me in the workforce. We require doing something about it and providing a conduit to permit the workforce to equalize, to open the doors up to a larger constituency.”

The CHIME initiative is in the early stages, discussing the issues and challenges that presently exist in increasing diversity in HIT leadership, and will utilize that dialogue to formulate education and services that the agency can deliver.

“It is important for CHIME to take a stand and appreciate that the workforce is changing,” Davis says. “If we do not do that, who are we fooling? We’re looking for a different kind of leader and a different type of workforce that can be the innovators of health IT.”

The emphasis to increase the number of females and minorities entering into STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education programs also is timely, Davis points out. “In healthcare, we’ve a chance to educate the population we serve and share what we do in the world—how do we convey that message that you can be one of us?”

The CHIME push comes at a time period when the HIT is struggling to fill positions, and it is significant for HIT leaders to indicate that top management ranks are open to women and members of minority groups, Johnson notes.

Next week at its spring forum and during the HIMSS conference, CHIME will seek opportunities to network with diverse populations to inquire what it can do and otherwise collect intelligence that will assist direct future efforts, Johnson claims.

“What’s significant is that, in coming from CHIME, it’s the senior-most IT executives in healthcare taking a stance to say we’re going to address (diversity) and improve it,” Earle says. “From that as a base, I look forward to what’s going to come.”

 

Veteran CIO Shafiq Rab moves for Chicago

Veteran CIO Shafiq Rab, chief information officer and senior vice president of information technology at the institute of Hackensack University Health Network in the region of New Jersey since the year of 2012, is heading towards Chicago.

Veteran CIO Shafiq Rab has accepted the positions of CIO and SVP at the institute of Rush University Medical Center, effective January 9.

Hackensack is a quickly growing system that only 5 months ago merged its operations with Meridian Health. In the month of November, the agency declared a contract to affiliate with JFK Health.

At Rush, Rab replaces Lac Van Tran, who served in the position since the year of 2002 before recently retiring.

At Hackensack, Veteran CIO Shafiq Rab assisted usher in the mobile era by launching iPads and the Apple Health Kit to enable patients and families more access to their medical records and electronic communication with care teams. He established an app enabling patient access to appointment scheduling, test results, prescription data and communication with physicians from any device.

He also supervised and led development of facial recognition technology to match sufferers to their information.

Rab initially served as CIO for 4 years at Greater Hudson Valley Health System, one year at Catskill Regional Medical Center, almost 5 years at Saint Mary’s Hospital and almost 4 years at Carrier Clinic/East Mountain Hospital.

As Rush continues to expand access to care across the region, linking our academic health network will be crucial,” Rush University Medical Center President Michael Dandorph claimed in a statement. “His clinical and public health expertise will assist Rush to use technology to grow its mission to make better the health of people and diverse communities it serves.”

 

Hospital IT: CIOs reveals their worst nightmares

Natural disasters, electronic health records downtime, Data breaches. They are all on the list. The more shocking ones? Not being disruptive sufficient and building systems that do not match what clinicians and patients really require.

When inquired what IT-related event frightens them most, several of the CIOs whose teams achieved the Best Hospital IT Departments rattled off a list of somewhat common dangers. Other executives, meanwhile, were more stressed with under-delivering on innovation.

"I do not need to get a phone call one day telling me our datacenter is on fire," stated Jesse Diaz, CIO of Phoebe Putney Health System in Albany, Georgia.

Henry County Medical Center IT director Pam Ridley added that a disaster – weather-related or otherwise – that knocked its information or data center out would be an information technology nightmare for her.

"Downtime. Mine is downtime," claimed Inspira Health Network CIO Tom Pacek. "Everything is electronic so we cannot have downtime. Clinicians do not know what to do when the systems aren’t up."

Silver Cross Hospital CIO Kevin Lane pointed to security tragedies from outside the system as a specifically thorny risk. Sonney Sapra, CIO of Tuality Healthcare stated "security breaches are the one thing that keeps me up at night."

But 2 CIOs interviewed for the Best Hospital IT Departments 2016 awards ranked disasters, downtime and data breaches lower than technology and innovation issues.

Now tell us what is your worst IT nightmare?

CHIME Acknowledges Phoenix Children’s Higginson for innovation

A Lean measure or step powered by numerous IT-supported attempts achieved efficiencies at Phoenix Children’s Higginson, leading to savings, as well as betterment in operations and sufferer satisfaction.

The outcomes of these attempts at the pediatric facility were among the reasons that its CIO, David Higginson, achieved the 2016 Innovator of the Year award at the Fall CIO Forum of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives.

Higginson achieved the award on the day of Wednesday at the CHIME occasion, in Scottsdale, Ariz. CHIME acknowledged the Phoenix Children’s Higginson for innovation.

For instance, rather than spending millions of dollars on a sufferer education and entertainment system, Phoenix Children’s Higginson put customizable iPads in sufferer rooms, enabling patients and their parents to access a host of facilities and services, involving clinical results, discharge instructions, educational resources over their treatment and more. One-time charges for the initiative were covered by support and grant from the James M. Cox Foundation, permitting the hospital to move resources to other areas.

“When you’re confronted with the choice of making a new emergency department to replace one that is seeing 3 times the number of sufferers it was constructed for, or spending $100 million on a piece of software, the answer appears to be obvious – search a way to do the system for a reasonable amount and leave the capital for the direct requirements of the patients and families we serve,” Higginson stated.

Various other annual awards were honored at the conference:

University of Colorado Hospital teamed up with analytics firm LeanTaaS to establish a solution that has provided patients larger access to life-saving dialysis treatments with far less wait times. This inventive partnership gained UCHealth and LeanTaaS CHIME’s 2016 Collaboration Award.

Pamela Arora, senior vice president and CIO at Children’s Health in Dallas; and Bryan Bliven, CIO at the University of Missouri Health Care were honored with the 2016 Transformational Leadership Awards for their remarkable work on cybersecurity. The award is sponsored by CHIME and the American Hospital Association.

Randy McCleese was awarded with CHIME’s 2016 Outstanding Service Award for his devotion to the profession and his endless affords to transform healthcare, in recognition of his work in policy and regulation attempts for healthcare IT.

Linda Hodges, ex-senior vice president and IT practice leader at Witt/Kieffer, was honored by the CHIME Foundation with the 2016 CHIME Foundation Industry Leader Award.

Philips was awarded with the inaugural CHIME Foundation Partner Award. Sara

 

CIOs hope healthcare IT spending to increase in 2017 year

Healthcare CIOs are more likely to grow healthcare IT spending over the next twelve months in contrast to top IT executives in other industries, as providers seek to make better the efficiency and business procedures. That’s why CIOs expect healthcare IT spending to increase in the year of 2017.

Healthcare IT executives also claim that they hope to sustain to struggle with important shortages in staff with required technology skills, in accordance to outcomes of a new survey from Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey.

The survey of 190 healthcare CIOs indicates that 52% expect increases in Healthcare IT spending budgets over the next year, while 35% assume unchanged budgets. By contrast, 45% of CIOs from entire industries say they hope budgets to increase, while 33% of them anticipate budgets to remain unchanged.

 “The Healthcare industry IT spend has been significantly low, but latest high profile security breaches, uncertainties over regulatory compliance, growing complexity of health IT systems and the deployment of digital and mobild healTh services to make better the patient access, satisfaction and brand loyalty have elevated the priority and spend in the board room for longer term investments,” summarizes a report on the survey’s findings.

Nevertheless, however 80% of CIOs show that there is an increasing strategic role for IT in their agencies, in contrast with 67% from all industries, only half of those surveyed claimed that they have a clear digital business vision and strategy, while the survey discovered that 39% of respondents were presently working on a digital business strategy.

In fact, healthcare agencies are less likely to have a digital business strategy, within business units or enterprise wide, than the all-industries average.

“Despite important increases in Healthcare IT spending in recent years, the maturity of IT contribution or investment in healthcare is yet lagging in comparison with other industries, and healthcare companies know they require catching up,” analyzed Vince Vickers, an advisory principal for healthcare and life sciences at KPMG.

“Healthcare agencies have primary operational cost pressures now more than ever, and there is a chance to close that gap rapidly with disruptive technologies and analytic devices that open the door to the notion of the ‘creative CIO,” he states.

Although, as Vickers points out, the survey discloses that healthcare lags other industries in vital technology skills. When inquired in what areas their agencies are suffering from skills shortages, 45% of healthcare CIOs said big data/analytics, 36% reacted to project management, 30% indicated change management, and 29% said security/resilience.

One sector that is gaining interest from healthcare agencies as a “means to leapfrog to more contemporary technology” is cloud computing, in accordance to Vickers. “No industry has a greater chance than healthcare to leverage the cloud to change its operations, decrease cost and make better its customer satisfaction (patient care) than healthcare,” he stated.

The top 3 reasons CIOs provided for utilizing the cloud were to make better the availability and resiliency (45%), to use the best solution available (35%) and to make better the agility and responsiveness (34%).

Still, at the similar time, those surveyed showed that the top 3 issues to adopting cloud computing were data loss and privacy risks (55%), integration with existing architecture (46%), and legal and regulatory compliance problems (42%). In specific, Vickers pointed out that one of the issues facing healthcare agencies is that few clinical software and electronic health record (EHR) systems are yet not available or optimized for the cloud.

 

Task force handles healthcare cybersecurity issues

A healthcare cybersecurity task force mandated by Congress is establishing a set of suggestions that it expects will assist to counter the increasing cyber threats that are putting sufferer information at risk. Task force handles and tackles key healthcare cybersecurity issues.

Established by the Department of Health and Human Services in reaction to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, the task force handles the cyber crime and is charged with investigating the healthcare’s challenges in securing information from hacker attacks and to analyze what best practices/lessons can be learned from other industries in how to successfully execute safeguards.

In accordance to Theresa Meadows, co-chair of the Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force and CIO of Cook Children’s Health Care System, the panel’s twenty subject matter experts are drawn from a huge variety of agencies involving contributors, payers, pharmaceutical agencies, medical device manufacturers, Information technology vendors, and government agencies.

“We’ve representation from entire segments within healthcare so that we can have well-rounded discussions,” stated Meadows. “There is also a sufferer advocate on the task force.”

Meadows claimed that the task force handles the cybersecurty and had held several public and private meetings to date and will be “wrapping up its charge” early next year, after which it will report to Congress on its findings and suggestions.

Among the places that the task force handles the healthcare cybersecurity, it will be addressing the following things in its final report:

• Reviewing issues to secure networked medical devices and other software or networks that link to an electronic health record;

• Giving the HHS Secretary with data to disseminate to healthcare industry stakeholders to make better their preparedness for, and response to, cybersecurity threats; and

• Developing a plan to make a single system for the federal government to share actionable intelligence regarding cybersecurity threats to the healthcare industry in near real-period for no fee.

“Today, there is not a great mechanism for sharing data when cybersecurity problems occur,” analyzes Meadows. “Normally what happens is we hear through word of mouth or we see it in the media, but we do not really know what the cause was and so there is no way for us to be proactive in stopping these things in our agencies.”

With the rash of latest ransomware attacks on healthcare agencies, Meadows claims that the panel will also be taking a glance at how to secure health data from these kinds of file-encrypting malware. The risk of Ransomware is within the “scope of threat that people require knowing about and how to decrease, so we’ll put together some suggestions around that,” she adds.

When it comes to the susceptibilities of networked medical devices, Meadows points out that most of the devices presently in use at healthcare services are between 5 to 10 years old. The issue with these legacy medical devices is that “10 years ago nobody was thinking about security,” she states.

As Meadows points out, compared to other industries, healthcare’s cybersecurity atmosphere is distinctive which can be restricting in terms of potential safeguards that can be put in place.

“In banking, they can lock down everything because they do not have to worry about a physician requiring access to patient data,” she remarks. “That is a normal regular occurrence and if we lock up the information then care can’t be given. If physicians do not have access to medical records or lab results, that is a big deal. They have got to have access to the information at all times.”

“We have got to search a model that works for healthcare and yet perits us to provide care—and that is the delicate balance,” she concludes. “We are in a information gathering mode right now.”

 

Change at the top at ONC not hoped to discourage HIT momentum

As Karen DeSalvo, MD, completes her time period today as the national coordinator for HIT to consider a full-time post as acting assistant secretary for the health, the mere surprise is that she didn’t make the move previously.

That is the perspective of David Muntz, an ex-deputy national coordinator at the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology from the time period of January 2012 to October 2013.

“Dr. DeSalvo has been doing a good job juggling 2 very significant jobs, both of which are more than full-time,” states Muntz, who also was appointed as CIO at Texas Health Resources and Baylor Health Care System, and now leads Muntz & Company LLC, a consultancy. “Just someone with her personal strength and devotion to purpose could do so efficaciously.” DeSalvo has been in both posts for almost 2 years, since the late 2014 year.

Now, the national coordinator post, effective on the day of August 15, shifts to Vindell Washington, MD, who has been appointed as principal deputy national coordinator at the top at ONC.

“Dr. Washington’s appointment offered few much required relief,” Muntz adds. “I consider it was prudent deployed on his track record to turn the reins over to him now to permit them both to work with complete concentration and authority on the significant problems in both places of responsibility. They both have proposed enviable track records, which bodes well for the future.”

Chuck Christian, a long period healthcare CIO and now vice president at the Indiana Health Information Exchange, has merely met the latest coordinator once since he merged with the top at ONC, but likes what he is seen. “In reading the comments of Dr. Washington on the top at ONC website and listening to few of his remarks, I am motivated that he’ll continue the work with his own leadership style.”

What that future holds, although, is murky. A recent presidential administration comes in during the month of January, and over time the latest occupants in the West Wing of the White House will evaluate who stays from the initial administration.

That DeSalvo left ONC now isn’t alarming, claims Pamela McNutt, CIO at Methodist Health System in the state of Texas. “ONC has been in proposed instability for few time, and, as it is a political appointment, it could all change in the year of 2017,” she further adds.

The resignation of DeSalvo isn’t shocking for another reason, as she served 2 years and 7 months in the post; 5 initial national coordinators basically served in the position for shorter periods of time.

Karen DeSalvo has been an amazing national coordinator,” claims Marc Probst, CIO at Intermountain Healthcare and the present board chair for the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME). “At a period, when the mere comments around MU and the FACA (federal advisory committees) programs were distinctively negative and crucial, Dr. DeSalvo was capable to come in and concentrate the federal attempts in a positive direction and rally the health information technology participants to move forward.

“Her purpose has always been about making better the healthcare through the utilization of IT and I never observed a single example of her making decisions for her advantage or political intention. I’ve been reputed to know and work with Karen,” Probst added. “Vindell appears to be a great leader with positive vision. It is motivating to observe that even within the very weird political climate of DC, and the small window of period before huge changes in Washington, he is working very hard to sprint in an attempt to keep the positive momentum.”

2 health IT trade associations released statements on the top at ONC change in the leadership.

MD Anderson changes to analytics, big data to battle the cancer, empower efficiencies

MD Anderson Cancer Center is sitting on 23 petabytes of data, involving more than 2 billion diagnostic radiology images, generated by its massive IT infrastructure. But Chris Belmont, vice president and CIO, is not intimidated by the amount of data—he’s just scared of staring at it too long.

“Our biggest fear when we decided to move into Big Data was that, like many healthcare organizations, we would have a 2-year data ‘ingestion’ process where we’d keep thinking about that massive set of data, and connect all our systems big and small together, go get even more data from external sources, and then eventually offer our users an add-on tool and tell them to go at it,” Belmont says. “By the time we’d be done ingesting all that data, the time to change the game in terms of costs or population health would have already passed.”

MD Anderson, the Houston-based health system devoted to cancer care, is not the kind of organization to let time slip by.

The center has embarked on a large-scale analytics effort to better understand the myriad forms of cancers it treats and establish the therapies and medication regimens to combat them. In the past six months, it’s also put together a Big Data infrastructure focused on pulling nuggets from every nook and cranny from the enterprise to make it more efficient, be it procurement data, cost data, enterprise resource planning or another data set hanging out there. Central to that effort is speed: The center needs to be capable to take ideas for data tools, assess and quantify their value, and then build them within a matter of weeks.

HIT Consider Ransomware a huge uncertainty for small targets

As evidenced daily in the news, today’s hackers are running a very victorious extortion racket utilizing the ransomware, and it is become a primary danger to healthcare agencies, large and small.

News reports tend to concentrate on the “big fish” that get snagged in the net of ransomware net, but smaller hospitals are aims for ransomware as well. Disruption to the continuity of facilities can be detrimental, no matter what the size of the agency is. The query is how big of an aim is your small hospital.

Small hospitals have various issues that are similar to those of their greater counterparts, but the infrastructure of a smaller hospital can pose extra issues. One of the most important barriers to an effective ransomware defense can be a deficiency of resources. More particularly, it is difficult for services in rural areas to recruit and retain required talent.

Moreover, it is also difficult for small services to have enough resources to make and manage a solid security program. In few little facilities, the security officer, the CIO and the COO are all the similar person—that increases the potential threat of security susceptibility, merely based on the fact that one person with diverse responsibilities lacks the time to cover all his or her several priorities. Business continuity is a high priority, but it might not get the attention it needs in a small agency.

There are ways for a small agency to decrease its vulnerability to IT security threats, like ransomware, without extra resources. Reducing threat without increasing costs can be accomplished by efficiently and effectively using present resources to strengthen the agency’s security defenses.

An agency’s powerful line of defense is the employee. Small hospitals need synergy for success in security prevention, because the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. As the old adage goes, an agency is merely as powerful as its weakest link; hence, addressing workers’ knowledge of significant security practices will strengthen the agency as a whole.

One action that can impact the whole agency is implementing a security awareness program against the ransomware, concentrating on education and communication, with the intent of stopping system users from performing dangerous actions, specifically clicking on risky web links contained in emails. Building a powerful security awareness program, can result in decreased risk of breach of confidential data, loss of continuity, as well as establish a more competently aware, and empowered worker.

This isn’t a short-term, one-time solution, and any such initiative should be tailored to the culture of the agency, keeping in mind the average rate of worker retention. A security awareness program not merely makes the worker aware, but empowers the worker, acting in a manner of teaching, advocating and influencing upon others the significance of security.

Empowered staff is more passionately engaged, and they mostly can find value in training that applies to how they conduct, and secure, their personal lives. Workers truly are the stakeholders promoting buy-in, ownership and accountability.

It is sometimes the small attempts that greatly decrease the risks to business continuity. One small attempt with the greatest gain is implementing an education and awareness program that involves the following components.

• Testing staff for recognizing and not falling prey to baseline risky actions.


• Recording baseline performance and setting improvement objectives.


• Executing a training response program that is tailored to the reactions of staff.


• Branding security continually through a program that involves staff through a monthly informative news article anonymously written by workers who have performed risky actions, thus promoting accountability and self-research/learning; transparently reporting quarterly to all staff on present metrics in relation to agencies goals; and consistent interaction through email, text and social media.

Nominations Starts Open for HDM Analytics All-Stars

Health Data Management is now accepting nominations for its Analytics All-Stars program, which identifies organizations and individuals implementing analytics in innovative ways to make better the health of sufferers and the financial performance of their organizations.

The program recognizes organizations in Project of the Year categories and individuals in the Visionaries of the Year categories. The target time for nominations is the day of  Friday, June 3..

Project of the Year categories are Population Health Management, Revenue Cycle Management, Accountable Care and Patient Safety. Visionaries of the Year categories are for CEO, CIO and Clinical visionaries.

Candidates can involve, but are not limited to, contributors (hospitals, physician/provider networks, clinics) and health insurers. Anyone can submit a nomination on behalf of an individual or organization. Third-party vendors are encouraged to nominate their healthcare clients.

Brigham and Women's Health Care selects the Landman CIO

Dr. Adam Landman was named CIO of Brigham and Women's Health Care in Boston, effective on the day of May 2. He replaces Dr. Cedric Priebe, who appointed as CIO from the month of January 2014 to September 2015.

Landman presently serves as Brigham's chief medical information officer for health information innovation and integration, a job that has him overseeing implementation of Epic Systems Corp. information technology systems. He is also an emergency department physician at the 793-bed teaching hospital.

A graduate of Yale University, Landman is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation clinical scholar and board-certified in emergency medicine and clinical informatics.

An affiliate of Harvard Medical School, Brigham serves more than 4.2 million sufferers yearly and employs nearly 16,000 people.

As customers shop for healthcare, HIT provides an edge

Craig Richardville observes a significant distinction between sufferers and consumers, and that distinction will have an effect on how contributors share data with them.

Richardville, senior vice president and CIO at Carolinas HealthCare System, already is adapting the way his agency is making data present to those it serves. It is a radical change in philosophy for most healthcare agencies, he considers.

“What we are seeing is various factors that have caused existing sufferers become customers of healthcare services, and now becoming true customers,” he claims. “People hope to be more mobile in acquiring their healthcare services. It becomes a very competitive atmosphere, and it will be up to us (as providers) to offer them the best value.”

The winner of the 2015 John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the year award, Richardville was in the state Las Vegas previous week to gain the honor, presented by both HIMSS and CHIME. He sees fellow CIOs and HIT executives ready to make the move into the recent age of healthcare, in which value will dictate how contributors operate.

“I think we are observing CIOs and HIT executives really transforming and becoming business leaders, concentrating on sufferers as consumers, and utilizing existing and latest technology to drive the business,” he states. “We are becoming a digital industry, no different than the economical services industry.”

Richardville noted that financial services have transitioned rapidly in the digital age, changing the way that customers interact with it and manage their financial transactions. He sees the similar future ahead for healthcare.

“We have moved into delivering services, and for IT, the objectives of the healthcare system become our goals,” he claims. “We can take advantage of the devices that are in our industry to achieve those targets and initiatives.”

Carolinas HealthCare has been utilizing the technology to make better the relationships with affiliated providers as well as sufferers. For instance, patients are better involved by offering them access to data through a single portal, now also accessible through a mobile app. They can observe data from various different information systems and care venues, without having to sign in multiple times or feeling that they are getting different views of their information.

“We are very agnostic when it comes to technology,” he states. “We are trying to create an open, transparent environment. We need to stay in touch with the sufferer and interact with them on a regular basis. We are agnostic as to whether they are using an IoS device or Android. As we are executing on this, we are initiating to see victory with managing the populations to which we have access.”

Richardville also has had opportunities to testify in Washington on HIT industry issues, and he observes recent moves by vendors and contributors on interoperability as a significant step toward making progress on the target.

“I have been on Capitol Hill a few times, and what we are beginning to see is more of a defined line of what will be done by the public sector in terms of makin policy; executing on that is up to us,” he claims. “I have had Congressmen say to me, ‘Look, government is a decade behind where the industry is—you do not need us setting standards for you. You require to assist us understand the problems and draw the line for what public policy requires to be.’ “

The problem on interoperability is clear and simple, he claims—“we do not actually want to compete on having data, but on how we use the data.”

Industry leaders require returning to what got them into healthcare in the 1^st place, he advices. “It is not about the money, merely selling products like they do in the retail sector. What we are doing is affecting persons’ lives, and those of their family and friends in the community,” he concludes. “For me, it is an honor to be a part of this industry.”

HIMSS16 speaker on making a roadmap to the healthcare cloud

Healthcare agencies making the move to a cloud-centric plan cannot lower their guard on security defenses, claims Chris Bowen, founder and chief privacy and security officer of ClearDATA, a healthcare cloud computing industry.

"People may consider that by offloading security responsibility to the cloud, they will not have to worry, but that is not the case," Bowen stated. "We know that risks exist in the cloud."

Bowen will explain this problem at HIMSS16 along with J. Gary Seay, senior vice president and CIO of Community Health Systems in a presentation titled, "Establishing a Cloud Security Roadmap."

Bowen and Seay will consider at the particular security issues facing healthcare organizations, which mostly rank behind retail and financial agencies in creating hardened, multi-layered accesses. The session will indicate how to establish a cloud security roadmap that can remove the main causes of information breaches using a "Defense in Depth" multi-layered approach to security.

The discussion will also look at how a contributor enterprise can establish a defense strategy that hardens security at 7 distinct layers: physical; network; application; server; data; devices; and users. If implemented right, cloud technology enables agencies to take benefit of many layers of security, which may range from data encryption to threat management, and drive accelerated compliance, cost savings and data analytics for healthcare agencies.

Contributors, vendors will join to measure interoperability

Research firm KLAS has established a new advisory team, containing contributors and EHR vendors as part of an initiative to approach health IT interoperability across the healthcare industry.

The advisory team, chaired by former Northwestern Memorial Hospital CIO Tim Zoph, will assist to oversee a nationwide KLAS survey targeted at measuring health information exchange and contributor satisfaction with vendor support in enabling interoperable networks. Finally, the aim is to publicly report real-world clinician experiences with vendor interoperability and to track industry growth in acquiring data exchange.

A measurement tool—passed by both contributors and vendors at a KLAS Keystone Summit arranged last fall in Midway, Utah—is the procedure by which KLAS will evaluate vendors’ abilities to execute interoperability abilities at their respective customer sites.

“This is a actually significant next step building upon the work that we started at the Keystone Summit,” states Daniel Nigrin, MD, CIO at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a member of the advisory team. “Because the team involves both contributor and vendor representatives, it will offer a balanced perspective in attempts to make better the measurement tool that was elaborated at the summit, with the mutual target of making better the state of interoperability in this country.”

In addition to Nigrin, the advisory team involves other eminent interoperability experts: John Halamka, MD, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Stan Huff, MD, CMIO at Intermountain Healthcare; and Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative.

Members of the advisory team drawn from the vendor community involve: Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, MEDITECH, Greenway, McKesson, Epic, GE Healthcare, MEDHOST, and NextGen Healthcare—all of whom have accepted to the steps of interoperability and ongoing reporting.

“This is a really significant threshold moment we have arrived at in the industry,” comments Tripathi. “It is not simple to get this type of agreement among contributors and vendors. I consider it speaks to the fact the industry is changing. Persons understand that we are in a new world here, and we have got to get this done, driven by the private sector. ”

The interoperability survey has started and will be completed and publicly reported by late September of the year 2016, in accordance to advisory team facilitator Bob Cash, vice president of provider relations at KLAS.

“We completed the questionnaire deployed on feedback we received at the Keystone Summit previous year and just recently initiated that out to the field to collect data from clinical end users,” states Cash, adding that KLAS is targeting approximately 500 contributors to gain their input, or over 40 or so consumers per EHR vendor.

Tripathi, who along with Halamka, Huff and Nigrin, assisted to establish the measurement tool for the survey analyzes that “unlike other type of survey instruments that KLAS has done in the past, this one is a lot more complicated and needs more governance because they are doing side-by-side comparisons of vendor interoperability and it has several variables—it is merely a different beast.” As a result of this complexity, he claims KLAS will truly call contributors and help walk them through the survey “instead of just throwing it over the transom.”

Finally, it is the user experience that matters most, Tripathi discusses, likening the procedure to having a Consumer Reports-like organization—in this case KLAS—collecting feedback from clinicians reporting on the usefulness of data exchanges.

“The one place where they differ from Consumer Reports is that KLAS does not have its own independent testing lab and does not really test vendor products,” he summarizes.