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David Feinberg will work with Google and other Alphabet companies to unify and innovate their various health projects. At Geisinger, Jaewon Ryu has been named interim president and CEO.

The traditional model of outpatient care is creating unnecessary pressure on patients, clinicians and the NHS as a whole, a new report from the UK's Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has warned. Excluding A&E, outpatient appointments account for around 85 per cent of all hospital-based activity in the UK, and figures indicate that the number of consultations has nearly doubled in England in the past decade. Inefficient systems, poor communication, delays and long waiting times illustrate the need for a different approach, according to the RCP.  The NHS should “grasp the nettle”, said Professor Stephen Powis, NHS England national medical director, and leveraging the use of technology and innovation to reduce frustration among clinicians and patients should be a key part of the redesign process. “As part of the long-term plan for the NHS, it’s right we look at ways to cut unnecessary appointments, save thousands of journeys, reduce traffic and pollution and make the NHS more efficient,” Professor Powis added. Webinar: Essential Knowledge Series: Trends in Outpatient Practice Management and EMR Solution Adoption Recent research from charity Age UK, cited by the RCP, indicated that a fifth of pensioners attending an outpatient consultation in the past year "reported feeling worse afterwards because of the stress involved in the journey alone". Remote monitoring and telephone or video appointments could reduce the heavy reliance on face-to-face consultations, and the RCP said both clinical staff and patients “recognised the benefit” of these alternatives in appropriate settings. But evidence also showed that patients did not want to “lose in-person contact”, and doctors argued that the best approach would be a combination of telehomecare and face-to-face consultations. Tech allowing patients to submit personalised data could also be used to drive self-management and enable "clinical monitoring from a distance", but the RCP warned that "making good use of technology requires careful thought and planning". "It is as much about changing clinical practice and professional culture as procuring high-quality, tested products," doctors said. Their findings also suggested that a reluctance to adopt digital technologies was due to “concerns with locally available IT infrastructure and support, data protection, loss of remuneration from clinical commissioning groups and discrimination among patients less comfortable with the necessary technology”. “Having re-evaluated the purpose of outpatient care and aligned its objectives with modern-day living and expectations, we must ensure that the benefits are measured in terms of long-term value for patients, the population and the environment, not just short-term financial savings,” said Dr Toby Hillman, co-author of the report, clinical lead for the RCP sustainability programme and consultant respiratory physician. Twitter: @1Leontina Contact the author: lpostelnicu@himss.org

The machine learning algorithm, which can anticipate how cells respond CRISPR-induced breaks, could help researchers repair gene mutations.

Respondents to new research indicated that major EHR vendors are not capable of precision medicine work.  

Last year’s WannaCry ransomware attack on the UK health service did more than expose weaknesses in healthcare cyber resilience – it also highlighted weaknesses in emergency responses to healthcare cyber attacks. Speaking at the recent HIMSS AsiaPac18 in Brisbane, Extreme Networks Healthcare Solutions Director Bob Zemke said a key lesson from the May 2017 attack was the importance of not just defending against risks, but of also having defined response plans when systems are compromised. The WannaCry attack hit more than 200,000 computers in over 100 countries, costing the UK’s NHS alone an estimated £92 million, exploiting a flaw in older Microsoft Windows operating systems, such as unpatched Win7 and Server 2008. “It started hitting any device with Windows hidden in the back of their systems, even the parking meters,” Zemke said. “It created a fear and response that was not based on logic. Instead, the response was to shut down as many systems as possible to prevent the infection from spreading.” Webinar: What Most Computer Security Defenses are Doing Wrong, and How to Fix It At many UK hospitals, this included shutting down the internal telephone system, even though it was not Windows-based. “We saw nurses actually notifying the media that the comms systems were taken offline,” he said. “Shutting off the systems created more panic and frustration in the clinical community. And then they went right to the media to voice their frustration and that made the situation even more of a pressure maker.”  Zemke said what is needed is a strategy for every connected device in a hospital, covering key questions such as: What is it? What does it do? What is the risk if the system goes offline? What are its normal activities and patterns of online communication? Does it need to talk to other systems? Is the device patchable or have you been instructed by the manufacturers to not apply operating system patches? “New security challenges will always arise – that's the world we live in,” he said.  “But the process and procedures we put in place ahead of time will allow us to then adequately and formally respond when an event takes place.” Zemke said better communication between clinical departments and the IT team was essential, including defining departmental liaisons and reporting structures, and response plans when events occur. It was also crucial to remember that many threats to connected systems do not emerge from outside. “Ten years ago when we looked at connected medical devices, we believed the idea that a firewall would protect them from the outside world,” Zemke said.  “We thought the vulnerabilities and threats were coming from outside hospital but what we found was we had more issues with just misconfigurations by vendors of devices operating in the same environment, rather than malicious attacks coming from the outside.” Originally published on Healthcare IT News Australia.

The Welsh Assembly Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has questioned the “competence, capability and capacity" across the system to digitise healthcare services in Wales after an inquiry uncovered a “raft of problems”, from delays in the delivery of digital projects to “unclear” lines of accountability. The committee found that there had been 21 outages of national systems from January to July this year. A letter from the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board indicated that a national data centre failure that occurred between 3 to 5 August affected “all of Wales”. The PAC said it was “deeply concerned about the slow pace of delivery of modern informatics systems”, asking the Welsh Government to set out a “clear timetable” to put the infrastructure on a “stable footing”. Webinar: The INFRAM: Your Pathway to Healthcare Infrastructure Development “We trust our inquiry and this report will be a wake-up call to all those involved in harnessing the power of digital innovation to improve healthcare in Wales. We believe it’s time for a reboot," said Nick Ramsay, PAC chairman. Dr Peter Saul, Royal College of GPs Wales Joint Chair, said the report, released today, raised "alarming findings about the weaknesses of IT in the Welsh NHS". "Data outages can be extraordinarily disruptive for practices and for patients. They affect appointments, prescriptions and the nuts and bolts of a functioning practice and can take hours to recover from. Unfortunately these data outages are becoming all too common, leaving GPs scrambling to find solutions or workarounds while waiting rooms fill up. "Embracing safe, reliable and innovative technology will be vital for the future of healthcare, but that will be undermined if the Welsh NHS cannot get its IT right. Whether it's the basics like appointment booking, or larger projects such as electronic prescribing or electronic patient records, we need IT that works," Dr Saul added. Government to review committee's findings The inquiry follows a report from the Wales Audit Office, published at the beginning of the year, which indicated that the NHS as a whole spends less than two per cent of its budget on ICT. It estimated that around £484m would be needed, on top of existing budgets, to digitise services. “There is a need for clarity from Welsh Government as to whether the tentative estimate is in the right ballpark, and the witnesses we asked thought it was, and whether significant resources will be set aside and over what time frame,” the committee said.  Their findings also indicated that the NHS Wales Informatics Service (NWIS), the organisation responsible for IT, was “being asked to do too much within its current resources and needed clearer priorities”, and concerns were raised about the cybersecurity risk posed by the CaNISC cancer IT system, which has not been supported by Microsoft since 2014.  "The Committee would like to see CANISC replaced urgently and as soon as is practicably possible," PAC members wrote in the report. "Given the red risk rating and the cybersecurity issues, there is a compelling argument for accelerating the work if possible. However, the Committee recognises that this would require careful consideration of the knock-on consequences." The Welsh Government and the NWIS said they would review the committee's findings in detail. “We welcome the report published today by the Public Accounts Committee into the use of information technology and the vital role it plays in our Welsh health and care system," said a spokesperson for NWIS. “We participated in the Public Accounts Committee review in April and July this year and were pleased to share insight into the specification, planning, delivery and management of national digital health and care services for Wales. “As an NHS organisation we are working with our partners across the health and care system to make the most of the benefits that digital services can offer to health and care professionals, patients and citizens." Twitter: @1Leontina Contact the author: lpostelnicu@himss.org

IT leaders should show the value of specific AI use cases, while also ensuring the C-suite understands the potentially slow or hard-to-define ROI.

What the 116th Congress might mean for the fate of the ACA and healthcare technology.

The team used convolutional neural networks on its own chest X-rays as well as imaging from NIH and Indiana University and said they did not perform equally.