Tom Sullivan

Making the healthcare system more patient-centered is the disruption the industry needs, said David Feinberg, MD.

CIOs and innovation officers point to companies such as Ikea, Lego, Oxo -- and how they have conducted observational studies to effectively understand UX and deliver products accordingly. 

A healthcare attorney spotlights big problems and offers advice on ways to navigate around the pitfalls, from cybersecurity insurance to HIPAA, social media to patient access. 

LOS ANGELES — Building on several best practices and basic blocking and tackling of cybersecurity, healthcare organizations must also take a higher-level view to effectively address the problems of today. “Cybersecurity could not be more important. The breaches continue to happen, in the federal government, the private sector, it’s all over,” said Ronald Ross, a fellow and data scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology here on Monday at the Privacy and Security Forum. In addition to outlining the new security engineering guidance document that NIST released on May 4, 2016, which he described as “the most important, most transformational,” he has worked on at NIST, Ross offered that high-level solution. “Leadership, governance, and accountability will solve 90 percent of our cyberbreaches,” Ross said. Sign up for the Healthcare IT News Privacy & Security Update newsletter. Symantec health information technology officer David Finn agreed, saying that a strong leader with governance in place can then hold people accountable when those policies and procedures are not working. “Governance has to include the CEO, CFO, the board,” Finn added. “Because that’s the only way it works.” That approach should take into account: expenditures, insurance, regulatory compliance and “all the things that companies do to mitigate risk,” said PwC managing director Lisa Gallagher. Kyle Gilliland, director of information security at Huntington Hospital said that healthcare entities cannot simply buy security. “It starts with taking a look at your business needs and trying to build security into those,” Gilliland said. Ross also said cybersecurity needs to be proactive, not reactive, and that healthcare organizations should build security into every facet of their business — and explained that when NIST was working on the new document, it reached out to engineers who build bridges, planes and other large systems to understand and incorporate their best practices.  [Also: NIST to release new guidance for strengthening hospital cybersecurity] “When a plane crashes or a bridge collapses, the first thing we do is call the engineers to find out why it happened,” Ross explained. In the event of a data breach, however, healthcare organizations typically collect more threat intelligence, rather than actually understanding their own weaknesses to improve upon those. NIST’s new guidelines can help lead entities in that direction, though Ross said regardless of which framework a hospital chooses, the best tactic is to pick one the organization understands, is comfortable with, and can execute against. “The only way to improve security is to architect and engineer your system,” Ross said. “You have to use engineering techniques to limit the damage adversaries can do.” Twitter: @SullyHIT Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

The workgroup’s research found productivity hiccups in providers’ coding, and clinical documentation alongside positive impacts for payers in the areas of claims validation and data analytics. But isn’t it too early to tell whether the transition really went well? 

Dubbed release candidate number 3, the latest incarnation of the emerging interoperability standard also brings advancements for workflow, eClaims, CCDA profiles and provider directories. 

IBM Watson said it will provide free storage to nonprofit organizations and academic medical center researchers using Apple’s ResearchKit. But developers looking to tap into the supercomputer's analytics will have to pay.

SQL Server 2016 will bring new functions for protecting data in motion and at rest, visual reporting, cloud-first features and big data analytics tools.

Here’s the rub: $50 billion might be hyperbole, but $5 billion is still a sizable enough market to drive innovations that health systems can harness to engage patients, better manage populations and ultimately improve care and the bottom line.    

With Google, IBM and Microsoft all setting sights squarely on healthcare, and analysts predicting 30 percent of providers will run cognitive analytics on patient data by 2018, the risk of investing too late may outweigh the risk of doing so too soon.