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A high percentage of IT workers admit to not following the same security protocols they are expected to enforce, according to a new survey conducted across the United States by Absolute, a Canadian security firm. In fact, 33 percent admitted to successfully hacking their own or another organization and 45 percent admitted to knowingly circumventing their own organization's security policies. "The big surprise for us in this survey is that the gatekeepers are really the gatecrashers," said Stephen Midgley, vice president of global marketing for Absolute. Moreover, he said, while the survey of IT department managers included several industries, the findings apply across the board, with healthcare no exception. [Also: Hollywood Presbyterian gives in to hackers, pays ransom] "Given that IT is the security gatekeeper for an organization, it was alarming to see such high incidents of non-compliant behavior by IT personnel," he said. "Even if these actions are being performed to validate existing infrastructure, senior leadership should be aware that this activity is occurring. It may also be worthwhile to consider third-party audits to ensure adherence with corporate security policies." IT decision-makers bear the brunt of responsibility. Of those surveyed, 78 percent said the organization's security is primarily IT's responsibility. The report also showed that 65 percent of IT decision makers believe they would likely lose their job in the event of a security breach. "The gaps in current data breach response plans and in upholding general best practice policies must be addressed," Midgley said. As he sees it, when it comes to security – especially in healthcare, but also in other sectors – there's an accountability divide. "That is a very precarious space for IT to be in," Midgley said. "They are tasked with data security, but aren't actually responsible for the device that contains that data.” "I think in healthcare it's magnified," he added, "because of HIPAA, HITECH, PHI. So, you can have all the security in place, but at the end of the day, IT is reliant on the employee to ensure security is implemented correctly. Yet, what we find is those very same employees try to find ways to circumvent the security policies that have been put in place." There's a lot of work for IT in terms of bridging that gap, he said, and recommended that organizations implement technology that is adapted to their environment that gives them complete visibility and control of the devices. Midgley mentioned the example of one healthcare entity that has a policy of automatically wiping data from any device – laptop, tablet or phone – that goes beyond a certain location. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "They assume that device has PHI on it," he said. "It's mitigating the risk of a data breach." The survey – which polled 501 U.S. adults who work in information security management roles in companies or organizations with 50 or more employees – found that security remains at the top of the IT spending list, with 87 percent of respondents expecting increased investment in security this year. Twitter: @HealthITNews

Nuance will unveil its Dragon Medical One Platform at HIMSS16, an evolution of its speech recognition and documentation tool that aims to redefine the relationship clinical users have with healthcare technology, the company says. According to Jonathon Dreyer, Nuance's director of cloud and mobile solutions marketing, increasing demands on physicians – not least the number of places they need to be and IT systems with which they're supposed to interact – has changed the equation, putting a premium on flexibility and mobility. Nuance touts its new cloud-based Dragon Medical One platform as a tool to offer physicians a unified speech recognition functionality – irrespective of care settings, workflows, devices or applications. The new version brings analytics functionality that keep tabs on the time spent documenting, helping health organizations track efficiency and productivity. Additionally, workflow enhancements such as Dragon Medical Advisor offer notes to help improve ICD-10 specificity, case mix index and more.  A pair of new features, PowerPack and PowerMic Mobile, enable users to tap into evidence-based content using a smartphone as a secure microphone to dictate, edit and navigate the EHR on any workstation. Whether they are dictating into EHRs or mobile messaging apps, the Dragon Medical One desktop app offers secure speech recognition wherever physicians need to document. With a unique Nuance Healthcare ID, doctors gain access to an ecosystem of personalized tools. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "We are always interested in technology that improves productivity, and cloud-based speech supports the ways physicians work and eases the effort of entering clinical documentation into patient records," said Don Fosen, director of IT at Naperville, Illinois-based Edward-Elmhurst Hospital, in a prepared statement, noting that the tools "have let us scale voice recognition in a way that we simply couldn't have done in any other way." Nuance’s Dreyer added that the vendor has been seeing a shift in doctors’ workflow.  "There's a general trend of physicians being in more places, having to interact with not just the EHR but with other technologies as part of their daily workflow," Dreyer said.  Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

IBM executives say the purchase adds not only a massive repository of health data to the Watson Health Cloud, but also an extensive client roster to IBM's Watson Health unit.

(SPONSORED) IT in health systems is a collection of moving parts, often spread across facilities in multiple locations and, increasingly, dispersed to a growing number and type of devices.

Ransomware attack had locked out administrators unless they agreed to the demand of 40 Bitcoins.

With more than 70 sessions on tap at HIMSS16 concentrating on value-based care, it promises to be among the hottest topics in this year’s show. HIMSS Quality, Cost, and Safety Committee leaders Shelley DiGiacomo, RN, vice president of consulting services at the Quammen Group and Pauline Byom, regional quality administrator at the Mayo Clinic, in fact, will share recommendations for quality reporting and performance requirements within the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System. [Also: 11 essential quotes from notable HIMSS keynotes] Last November, HIMSS warned the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of the administrative burdens on providers, and now the tension continues. On Jan. 14, 31 major healthcare organizations, including Intermountain Healthcare and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center wrote to CMS calling for the federal government to back down off of Meaningful Use 3. It’s not meeting the ultimate objective, the organizations said. At HIMSS16, DiGiacomo and Byom will explain the HIMSS committee’s core mission to promote the use of health IT to improve the quality of healthcare delivery while ensuring that data collection is not an overly burdensome part of workflow. See all of our HIMSS16 previews The speakers will also share insights about the policies that are driving value-based care and tips for recognizing current barriers to e-reporting in quality programs and advice on developing principles for feedback on CMS programs. What’s more, DiGiacomo and Byom intend to help attendees know how best to identify opportunities to participate in the development of CMS policy outside of regulatory public comments. Come to the keynote, “Making Payment for Value Work: HIMSS Recommendations,” and find out HIMSS’ predictions on Monday, Feb. 29 from 3:15 - 4:15 p.m. at the Sands Expo Convention Center, Lando, Room 4301. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Apple chief defies government demands to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists, creating a backdoor into the system’s software.

Have you heard of the #HIMSS16 MixTape? Well, Colin Hung is the man who put that together. He also founded and moderates the Healthcare Leadership (#hlcdr) and serves as a healthcare marketing executive at Stericycle Communications Solutions in Toronto. And at HIMSS16 he’ll be among the Social Media Ambassadors credentialed to cover the conference via multiple channels. See all of our HIMSS16 previews Hung answered our questions leading up to HIMSS16. Q: What’s your top health IT prediction for 2016? A: There will still be more talk about interoperability in 2016 than action. On a more optimistic side, I think that the conversation will shift from compliance to innovation in 2016.  Q: What are you most looking forward to learning about at HIMSS16. A: I'm really excited about the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence for healthcare. I think IBM Watson and other related technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way healthcare is delivered. I'm definitely hoping to learn more about the practical applications for that Big Data + AI combination. I'm also looking forward to seeing what's next for the EHR vendors. Now that the meaningful use program is in its twilight, I'm really curious to see if one of the players decides it's time to "break-the-mold" and take their system in a completely new direction. I certainly hope someone will seize this opportunity once the meaningful use shackles come off.  Q: What inspired you to apply for the SMA program? A: Since the program started, I've made it a point to follow the SMAs during HIMSS and I have always found their tweets, posts and comments to be extremely valuable. At a conference the size of HIMSS there is a lot of noise. I find that the SMAs help cut through the babble and they somehow find a way to highlight undercurrents that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. It's exciting to be part of the SMA team doing that at #HIMSS16. Q: What in your mind are the untold benefits of social media in healthcare today? A: I think one of the most untapped uses of social media in healthcare is crowdsourcing feedback. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are amazing platforms to test ideas. There isn't another place where you can go and tap into a community of people who are passionate about improving healthcare for feedback. I'm constantly pinging friends I've met online for their opinion on ideas that I have, to clarify my understanding of a particular topic or to ask for reference materials. If I were involved in product development I'd tap into social media to solicit feedback on UX/UI designs and vet approaches to developing products. That to me is the one of the greatest uses of social media that very few are realizing.  Q: What's something that even your devout followers likely don't know about you? A: Oh this is a tough one. I think most people know about my love of all things SciFi and how I first met John Lynn (@techguy) while tweeting/texting using a phone in each hand at HIMSS12. But what people probably don't know is that I love sushi. Can't get enough of it.  Twitter: @SullyHIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Kiosk maker CTS Healthcare Services will start targeting mid-size and smaller provider organizations when it introduces at HIMSS16 new middleware dubbed Kwerk. Since it launched its first kiosks in 2005, CTS Healthcare Services has racked up more than 200 million patient check-ins on its kiosks, the vendor said. More than 95 percent of healthcare organizations using the Welcome patient check-in component of Epic’s electronic health record system use CTS Healthcare Services kiosks, CTS Healthcare Services said. This is because Epic was very early to the patient check-in game, enabling the critical integration component. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT But there is a whole healthcare world beyond Epic, said Sandy Nix, president and CEO of CTS Healthcare Services. “We’ve found a lot of potential customers with an interest in deploying check-in solutions but without the appropriate middleware piece that allows kiosks to talk to their EHRs,” Nix said. “So we developed Kwerk, which will talk to not only the EHRs in larger facilities but also serve as a bundled product we can offer the mid-market so potential customers at that level can have healthcare-proven hardware and high-quality patient check-in software solutions in an affordable package.” Kwerk will connect with EHRs in any size facility, but will also enable smaller organizations that simply want a standalone check-in solution to have one. In addition to patient check-in, the kiosks can accept co-pays and bill payments, be used for patient scheduling, secure consent to treatment signatures, issue privacy notices, change demographic information, and more. CTS Healthcare Services will offer Kwerk on a subscription basis, Nix said. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

SA Ignite plans to launch PQRS Assistant, a system that provides an automated way for provider organizations to track the various levels and scores for Medicare Part B payments, at HIMSS16. The Physician Quality Reporting System is a quality reporting program from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that encourages individual eligible professionals and group practices to report information on the quality of care to Medicare. PQRS gives participating professionals and group practices the opportunity to assess the quality of care they provide to their patients, helping to ensure that patients get the right care at the right time, CMS said. SA Ignite’s meaningful use system is used to automate attestation, the vendor said, and the company now is adapting meaningful use lessons learned to help providers respond to the increasing number of pay-for-performance models in healthcare, said Tom Lee, founder and CEO of SA Ignite. See all of our HIMSS16 previews “PQRS is a longstanding program and set of measures, but in recent years CMS has used PQRS to turn from pay-for-reporting to pay-for-performance in Medicare Part B,” Lee said. “In pay-for-reporting, providers just submit a number of measures and regardless of those values are incentivized in the same amount or avoid the same penalty. In Medicare Part B, the game has changed, and these measures now are used for pay-for-performance. Providers measure values and are rated against other peers across the country, and then are placed in different quality tiers, which directly affects their reimbursement.” Currently, the CMS report card for Medicare Part B is not communicated to a provider organization until nine months after a performance year has concluded, Lee said. As such, there is no real-time monitoring of quality scores during a performance year. “Our new PQRS Assistant system enables a provider organization to predict during a performance year what its CMS quality score will be based on, and as a result, the organization can make changes to its workflows to maximize its score while it still has a chance to make a difference,” Lee said. “The ultimate vision is combining our MU Assistant with our PQRS Assistant and have their predictive analytics focused on back-office score optimization.” The CMS Merit-Based Incentive Payments System, or MIPS, for Medicare Part B starts in 2017, appears to bring together meaningful use and PQRS in a value-based payment model where providers will have a MIPS score. Under MIPS, every provider organization will earn up to 100 points on a competitive scale to be able to gain up to a 27 percent bonus or lose up to a 9 percent penalty. Lee said provider organizations can calculate the return on investment of this technology based on the new reality in healthcare. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] “These value-based rules are very complicated and change all the time, and in the absence of automation it’s very difficult to fulfill the new business processes,” he said. “You are left with people using very primitive tools like spreadsheets to try to manipulate data to try and comply with a payer’s requirements. Further, provider organizations now are forced to do even more with even less. Because of the complexity on the value-based side of payments, including population health efforts, things simply are getting more complicated with more money attached.” When it comes to provider organization staff trying to cope with the new reality of value-based payments, the supply of qualified professionals, such as data analysts and compliance experts, who know how to optimize for value is getting out of balance with the demand, Lee said. “So you need technology that allows fewer people to do more,” he said. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.