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Over the past decade, workloads and data have moved increasingly into the cloud. For the healthcare industry, that means personal health information is stored in multiple environments – and so security should be able to respond to threats across those environments too. "As the IT estate continued to evolve, the traditional 'gate in castle' approach to security became less and less relevant," said Ryan Smith, VP of product at Armor Cloud Security, in a HIMSS20 Digital presentation.  "It was no longer sufficient enough to have a firewall on the outside perimeter," he said. "Instead, you had to begin focusing on the workload. When you think about security, you have to be thinking about how you're protecting that workload." During his talk, Maintaining Visibility and Security Across Hybrid Infrastructure Deployments in the Healthcare Industry, Smith explained that cloud-based security failures are nearly always the fault of the customer, rather than the security provider – and that in healthcare companies, orchestrating security teams is often "a very fragmented picture." This means, Smith said, that security in the cloud is not a technology problem, but an operations problem – and a cultural problem – for businesses. The defense of healthcare information, in particular, presents a number of unique challenges, including a murky understanding of cloud architecture and data landscapes, poor authentication, weak role-based controls, stubborn end-user adoption, and a lack of orchestration between point solutions.  Another hurdle, Smith said, involves furthering the understanding that regulatory constraints under HIPAA aren't always prescriptive.  "Compliance is built on a checklist of how we should maintain best practices," Smith said. "Compliance is more of a point-in-time snapshot. … Security never sleeps, while compliance is often a once-a-year activity." "Threat actors don't care if you're compliant," he pointed out. Plus, as Smith noted, compliance often results from security.  Security platforms should protect the data environment from both accidental and intentional threats, Smith said. He explained that tools focused on Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection and Cloud Access Security Brokers can work together to address the all-around security needs of an organization. This is important, Smith said, because "healthcare data is gold to bad actors."  The financial impact of data breaches is often significant due to government fines, loss of customers or theft of intellectual property. "If you are subject to breach," Smith said, "there is tremendous impact to the business." .jumbotron{ background-image: url("/sites/hitn/files/u2556/HIMSSDigitalJumbo.jpg"); background-size: cover; color: white; } .jumbotron h2{ color: white; } HIMSS20 Digital Experience the education, innovation and collaboration of the HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition… virtually. Kat Jercich is senior editor of Healthcare IT News. Twitter: @kjercich Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

The collaboration is aimed at improving patient experience by offering insights into physicians, access to price comparisons and more.

Physicians in Denmark, Finland and Sweden now have the opportunity to use a native-language conversational AI solution to effectively capture patient stories, reduce administrative workloads and improve care quality with an EHR-integrated solution. 

While the Authority reintroduces services, private hospitals that have been assisting in treating patients are being phased out of the programme. However, more isolation facilities are still being launched.

Over a six-week period in April and May this year, Bendigo Health in regional Victoria conducted roughly 2700 telehealth outpatient appointments across the Loddon Mallee region. Compared to a year prior to the six-week period, only 187 telehealth appointments were conducted. The departments that contributed to this huge increase include Oncology (1010 appointments), Child and Acute Mental Health Services (352 appointments), Outpatient Rehabilitation (220 appointments), Speech Pathology (103 appointments) and Midwife Services (78 appointments). As such, Bendigo Health plans to re-evaluate the role of telehealth in its model of care after a huge uptake in the service during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also recently surveyed the telehealth experience of 41 oncology patients and 76% indicated they would like telehealth to be an ongoing option for certain appointments. THE LARGER TREND Given the surge in the popularity of telehealth in handling the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare providers are considering to integrate more of these services in the near future. For example at Singapore’s Tan Tock Seng Hospital, video-consultation sessions starting with the hospital’s psychiatry unit have been implemented to ensure that patients get their care remotely, Healthcare IT News reported. Bendigo Health also rolled out a cloud-based remote monitoring system for suspected COVID-19 patients, which supplies doctors and nurses with a dashboard of daily updated symptoms and health vitals to remotely stay on top of their patients’ health. ON THE RECORD “In the future we do believe there’s a number of appointments that can and should be done virtually for patient conveniences and the efficiency of our service,” said Peter Faulkner, Chief Executive of Bendigo Health.  

A decade-long study just published in JAMA finds a wide variance in the safety performance of operational EHR systems, especially when it comes to reducing adverse drug events.

The chief nursing officer at Medicomp explains how EHR makers can combat burnout by building better, nurse-inclusive systems with input from frontline staff.

Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Illinois, said she introduced the legislation in hopes of gathering data to support post-pandemic continuation of relaxed CMS rules around telemedicine.