Tom Sullivan

Ohio Governor John Kasich said during Tuesday night's Presidential Town Hall that he has a plan to replace Obamacare while Texas Senator Ted Cruz pointed to the VA as an area that needs greater accountability when it comes to healthcare.  

A new report determined that a dozen key executives have left in the past year and half of those since January 1, 2016. And some people are pointing the finger at CEO Andrew Conrad.

The company’s spring 2016 release also includes new features for iOS and Android devices.

Leading providers are already thinking about how to transform themselves from data-driven to information-driven organizations, able to offer drastically improved patient experience akin to Amazon and Google. But it's not easy.

The Office for Civil Rights has launched a new round of HIPAA audits. Will the program succeed in improving privacy and security practices and protecting patient data? Or could it have the opposite impact?  

COO Jeff Williams said the framework will empower patients and care teams to have more formalized discussions with physicians, beginning with programs for Parkinson’s and post-surgical plans.

Saying that smaller government equates to greater freedom, the Republican candidate vowed to abolish the IRS, cut welfare and follow Reagan's lead to bolster U.S. military in a speech taking aim at Donald Trump while also welcoming Marco Rubio backers.

Organized criminals scoped their sights on healthcare somewhere around 2012 and found that stealing patient data enabled them to monetize that information in a number of ways. Since then tactics have grown increasingly sophisticated and attackers are launching more attempts now than ever. Perhaps coincidentally that’s also when the stream of lost unencrypted hardware began slowing down, said Kurt Long, CEO of application security specialist FairWarning. “That’s not to say that laptops don’t still get lost, but the peak years for that were 2008-2012,” Long determined. “I don’t know that lost laptops were all that damaging. It could be in the bottom of the Hudson River. We don’t know where that data went.” But since healthcare organizations have to publicly disclose those incidents, whether the information was actually exposed to criminals or not, the industry swallowed a steady diet of headlines about data breaches. The era of targeted attacks, however, appears to be significantly more threatening — and it’s already upon us. Healthcare organizations, in fact, have been hit by one hack per month during the last year, according to a Ponemon Institute study. Ponemon questioned 535 IT security professionals working at public, private and government healthcare organizations and found that the most common threat is attackers exploiting existing software vulnerabilities that are more than three months old. Newer vulnerabilities and spearphishing -- sending targets an email aiming to get them to click on an executable or other malicious code -- ranked second and third, respectively. [Also: Hollywood Presbyterian pays $17,000 to regain control over systems] From the criminal’s perspective the beauty of these attacks is that they are relatively low-risk with a big potential to make plenty of money by using elegantly simple tactics, said Secure Ideas CEO Kevin Johnson.   “As much as I’d like to say it’s cool and magic, it’s really not. It’s basic IT cleanliness,” Johnson explained. “And IT cleanliness is not ingrained in healthcare.” That fact paved the way for the years FairWarning’s Long described as an era in which organized crime squarely targeted healthcare, circa 2012-2015. By combing through public documents like court reports and reading indictments as well as interviewing Treasury Department officials, Long and colleagues showed that criminals are stealing patient records to commit medical ID theft but also to defraud the Internal Revenue Service by filing fake returns with the stolen information. While those practices are not likely to vanish anytime soon, Long said the industry is already entering a new phase. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] “The next wave is hacktivists and foreign nationals that want to expose some wrong they think needs to be righted as well as international crime syndicates with financial motivations,” Long said. Long explained that typically the criminals seeking money are in Russia and eastern Europe, while the Chinese are after our state secrets or looking to blackmail U.S. ambassadors — and the hacktivists location is something we don’t even know because they could be anywhere. Regardless of who perpetrates the attack, though, what’s on the line is trust. “It’s the ultimate high stakes game because at some point if the trust breaks down between patients and clinicians such that people are afraid to share health information and withhold it instead because they don’t trust providers, that’s only going to escalate,” Long said. “This is a battle we have to win.” Twitter: @SullyHIT

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz promised during a nighttime speech in his home state that he would kill the Affordable Care Act, “abolish” the Internal Revenue Service, stop amnesty and rebuild the military. Shortly after Florida Sen. Marco Rubio effectively lost his home state and bowed out of the race, Cruz’s overarching theme was that “beginning tomorrow morning” the battle is between Cruz and Trump. [Also: Trump releases broad outline of health reforms to replace Obamacare] “When I’m President we will repeal every word of Obamacare,” Cruz said. “We will make Washington less relevant.” Cruz continued that his top three priorities as President would be jobs, freedom and security. The job creation issue spans many industries and Cruz was not particular to just healthcare, of course. Cruz pointed to the specific freedoms as religious beliefs and protecting citizens’ Second Amendment rights to own firearms. And when it comes to security he cited former Republican President Ronald Reagan and how he bolstered the military to win the Cold War as a model for how we would, if elected, take on ISIS. Cruz also promised to reform the Internal Revenue Service by instituting a flat tax, ending amnesty and welfare benefits for people living in America illegally, and getting the government “off the backs” of small business owners across the country. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] “We’ll fire regulators,” Cruz explained. “Less government is more freedom.” Although Ohio Rep. Governor John Kasich is still running, Cruz is calling it a two-candidate race at this point. What with Trump’s 621 delegates versus Cruz’s 396 and primary elections in winner-take-all states such as California, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin still to come, it’s still too soon to say that either Cruz or Trump is precluded from winning the nomination ahead of the Republican National Convention come July 18-21, 2016. Twitter: @SullyHIT

CMS, ONC promise to not only accelerate adoption of the interoperability spec but also have some providers looking ahead at ways they can put it to use.