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Patients were frustrated with the outpatient registration process, but a web-based approach with online questionnaires boosted check-in rates and satisfaction scores.

Frost & Sullivan research found hospitals focusing on collaboration to improve security and maintain medical device connectivity and uptime as top priorities.

The nonprofit group is joining with six state medical societies to incentivize practicing physicians to link their EHRs to health information exchanges.

In May, the annual meeting of internists in Germany took place in Wiesbaden - and was attended by around 8,300 physicians and experts, as well as 2,000 patients. The 125th Congress of the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) looked at digital medicine and the opportunities, risks and perspectives in connection with major topics such as intensive care medicine, rare diseases, non-drug therapies and health research. So, what opportunities does digital medicine offer the internist? According to speakers at the congress this year, the aim must be to use digitisation tools effectively in order to facilitate earlier diagnosis and better treatments.  "Ultimately, we want to gain more time to turn to the patients - a concern of ours that can be achieved with digital medicine, if used properly," said Professor Claus Vogelmeier, chairman of the event. The conference looked at big data and data security, as well as personalised colorectal cancer screening and the potential for digital tools in specific diseases such as thyroid carcinoma. On the record Doctors should not be controlled by fears, but by hope and optimism, said Professor Vogelmeier, while Frank Ulrich Montgomery, president of the German Medical Association (BÄK), argued that Germany was behind in terms of digitising its healthcare system, particularly when compared to other modern industrialised countries. “In many countries that we regard as developing countries, the possibilities and opportunities of digitisation have been used and understood much more than in our country, " he told delegates at the event. Need for patient empowerment The conference also organised a special ‘Patient Day’, which was attended by around 2,000 people, and, at a press conference, physician and comedian Eckart von Hirschhausen talked about empowering patients through the use of digital tools. "We urgently need transparent, publicly financed jointly financed sites and search engines with evidence-based, tested content without commercial interests," Hirschhausen said. Focus on research centres In addition, the congress presented to the public results from research carried out by the German Centers for Health Research (DZG), in which certain major disease areas are investigated and researched with a result- and application-oriented approach. The aim is to prepare internists for everyday practice and shift the focus to a holistic approach, according to speakers at the event. Meanwhile, with the "Young Internists Forum", the congress was also aimed specifically at students and young doctors of internal medicine who visited it numerous times. More information can be found here. Anna Engberg is a Wiesbaden-based freelance journalist specialising in health and technology.

The personal data of 4,297 people has been compromised after a website hack, according to a statement by the Singapore Red Cross (SRC) on May 16.  Last Wednesday (May 8), SRC said it was alerted by its web developer to an incident of unauthorised access to the part of its website which supports the recruitment of interested blood donors. Information of 4,297 people who registered their interest on the website was compromised. Their names, contact numbers, e-mails, declared blood types, preferred appointment dates and times and preferred locations for blood donations were leaked.  Investigations to determine the cause of the incident are ongoing but preliminary findings show that a weak administrator password could have left the website vulnerable to the unauthorised access, said SRC. A police report was made on the same day and the incident was also reported to the Personal Data Protection Commission and Health Sciences Authority (HSA), a statutory board under the Ministry of Health.  “Our immediate priority is to ensure affected individuals and partners are notified, while working with the relevant parties to restore and strengthen our IT systems, safeguard our data, and mitigate any future risks,” said SRC CEO Benjamin William in a statement. SRC has temporarily disconnected the website from internet access and replaced it with a temporary webpage until security checks are completed. External consultants have been engaged to conduct a forensic investigation on the hack. The latest healthcare-related data breach at the SRC comes after a series of similar events in Singapore earlier this year – in January, the confidential information of more than 14,000 HIV-positive individuals were leaked and in March, the HSA reported that the personal information of 800,000 blood donors were left exposed by their vendor.

New EHR decisions impacted around 380 hospitals outside the US last year, according to research firm KLAS.

[Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated that Bumrungrad launched the Foundation One CDx panel. The system developed its own panel. The article is now updated. We regret the error.] Bumrungrad International Hospital, a private multiple-specialty medical centre founded 1980 in Bangkok, Thailand, announced the launch of its own genomic profiling panel for cancer treatment. A Core Genomics Facility has been established to produce validated panels in-house. Since all patients are different, specific individual treatments, often called targeted therapies or precision medicine, are customised to each patient and can be more effective than standard cancer treatments. What’s the trend Earlier in February this year, BC Platforms, a company which specialises in powerful genomic data management and analysis solutions, partnered with Bumrungrad International Hospital to provide its customisable end-to-end Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to enable Bumrungrad to offer personalised healthcare solutions for their patients in the clinic. Bumrungrad will also participate in providing its extensive Asian data and samples to BCRQUEST, providing additional sample diversity and data resources for researchers. On the record “It is a misconception that cancer is mostly hereditary. In many cases, personalised cancer treatment is better. Everybody has a different genetic make-up which makes us susceptible to different diseases therefore medication can work in different ways for different people. In some cases, we can use targeted therapy to help control the cancer,” said Dr Surasit Issarachai, an Oncology Specialist at Horizon Regional Cancer Centre, Bumrungrad International Hospital in a statement.

Four imaging technology experts offer healthcare CIOs and other executives and health IT workers advice for bringing new imaging tech online.

Even as EHRs, telemedicine and AI continue to transform clinical practice, certain core human qualities – civility, respect, empathy, collaboration – are "what make us valuable."