Bill Siwicki

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.

Digital document kingpin Adobe has unveiled the first integration between Adobe Sign and Adobe Marketing Cloud. The integration is designed to eliminate costs and inefficiencies surrounding manual, paper-based processes for enrolling and services, including healthcare enrollment, registration and services. Adobe Sign, formerly known as Document Cloud eSign, now features an upgraded and modernized mobile app experience and works in a seamless fashion with Adobe Experience Manager Forms, a key component of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Adobe said this can help an organization go completely digital with anything from credit card applications to government benefit forms to medical forms. Adobe also has announced new Document Cloud storage integrations with Box and Microsoft OneDrive. These integrations are designed to make it easier to access and work on PDF files from anywhere. "Adobe has led the global standard in secure digital documents with the PDF format, and we are working toward the same thing with secure and reliable signatures," said Lisa Croft, group product marketing manager for Document Cloud at Adobe. "And related to Adobe Sign, we are announcing the first integration across the Adobe Marketing Cloud, because we are focused on helping customers deliver good experiences for their customers." Croft cited healthcare as an example, where organizations need, for instance, to digitally obtain information from a patient. "That journey can be a big challenge, to serve the patient appropriately and set everything up," she added. "This new integration is meant to make all of that easier." Tools within Adobe Marketing Cloud can ease the creation of forms with many multiple data fields, and make completing such forms an easier task, Croft said. "In a lot of cases today, healthcare organizations still have to print forms to gather signatures," she said. "With our new integration, we have been able to make that process 100 percent digital. Take all the data and flow it into a final version of a form and then Sign can electronically capture a signature – nothing has to be printed. A healthcare organization can do the whole patient onboarding process without having to print a document."