Bill Siwicki

The cyber-threats are increasingly hitting healthcare organizations with great effectiveness, and the OCR is preparing to assist executives seeking to better protect their data and systems.

Cybercriminals have set their sights on healthcare. Ransomware is the new normal. And many providers are approaching security all wrong. CIOs, CISOs, ethical hackers and other experts point the way forward. 

The federal regulatory environment has not kept pace with the progress of mobile health, which is driven by consumers who expect to have all sorts of information, including health data, on their phones.

Nearly 90 percent of healthcare organizations have experienced data breaches, and for the second year in a row criminal attacks are the leading cause of breaches in healthcare, according to the Sixth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy and Security of Healthcare Data.

The next big step in population health is greatly expanding what defines a population. And that process will require a new generation of technologies, according to Adrian Zai of Massachusetts General.

While accurate data on deaths associated with medical errors is lacking, it is estimated that between 210,000 and 400,000 people in the U.S. die every year because of medical errors, making medical errors the third biggest cause of death in the country after heart disease and cancer, a new study found. While human error can never be completely eliminated, better measurement of medical errors can mitigate the frequency, visibility and consequences of such errors, the study said. To remedy the problem of human error, hospitals should properly investigate patient deaths for potential contribution of error, and should include additional information on death certificates, according to “Medical error—The third leading cause of death in the U.S.,” a report from research firm The BMJ. Martin Makary and Michael Daniel at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore noted that U.S. death certificates have no place for acknowledging medical error, and the academics call for better reporting to help understand the scale of the medical errors problem and how to tackle it, the BMJ report said. Currently, death certification depends on assigning an International Classification of Disease (ICD) code to the cause of death; thus, causes of death not associated with an ICD code, such as human and system factors, are not captured. As a result, accurate data on deaths associated with medical errors is lacking. Using studies from 1999 onward, and extrapolating to the total number of U.S. hospital admissions in 2013, Makary and Daniel calculated a mean rate of death from medical errors of 251,454 a year, the study said. They acknowledge that human error is inevitable, but say “although we cannot eliminate human error, we can better measure the problem to design safer systems mitigating its frequency, visibility and consequences,” according to the study. The Johns Hopkins experts believe strategies to reduce death from medical care should include three steps: Making errors more visible when they occur so their effects can be intercepted; having remedies at hand to rescue patients; and making errors less frequent by following principles that take human limitations into account, the study reported. For instance, instead of simply requiring cause of death, they suggest that death certificates could contain an extra field asking whether a preventable complication stemming from the patient’s medical care contributed to the death. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com

Michael Kaiser on how healthcare organizations struggling to find great employees can guard against an array of new cyberthreats. And it begins with finding farm teams akin to ones that Major League Baseball teams use to cultivate players.

A legal expert discusses the Office for Civil Rights' outreach to the healthcare and technology industries on the subject of where and how HIPAA does and does not apply in the growing arena of mHealth.

By and large, population health measurement efforts are poorly developed and uncoordinated – and without effective measurement success will remain elusive, says Georgetown's Michael A. Stoto.

CloudMedx, a big data health analytics company, has acquired Gyrus Labs to extend its CloudMedx Analytics Platform, which is designed to help improve patient care through data insights.