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The vendor, which focuses on small and rural healthcare providers, is interested in a suite of tools for chronic care management and aggregation of clinical and personal health data.

Experts from across health IT, including members of the HL7 board and advisory council, say the new standard can do big things for data exchange, but it's not a cure-all.

A new study from vendor Vectra monitored network traffic for six months to find the most prevalent methods attackers use to gain control and access protected information.

Healthcare leader representatives from Singapore, Australia and the Philippines took centre stage as the HIMSS Singapore eHealth & Health 2.0 Summit officially kicked off on April 23 with the CXO Panel session on the topic of disruptive innovation for value-based care.  “Today’s healthcare model is based on ‘more is better,’ but I think the healthcare model of tomorrow ought to be when ‘better is more.’ When we look at that shift from the volume to value-driven care approach to how we are going to look after our patients, and take care of them with themselves being ‘activated’ to so, it will change the paradigm of how healthcare is interpreted and can be delivered,” explained Dr. Eugene Soh, chief executive officer, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Singapore.  According to Dr. Soh, what value-based care means to him is the idea of how to expand value over time and space because value is delivered today in a very episodic manner and he believes the future will be a more relationship-based model. From his experience working in the Philippines, Mr. Christian Besler, chief digital officer, Ayala Healthcare, said that what value-based care means to him is threefold: bringing about affordability, accessibility and quality of healthcare to the masses, especially in a country where good quality healthcare tends to be concentrated in urban areas. The role of telehealth Dr. Stephen Chan, chief medical information officer, Woodlands Health Campus Singapore, who was also the panel moderator, posed the question on the role of telehealth in Singapore to the panel: Despite the country’s small geographical size, could telehealth be customised to the local population? Is it more than just “access” for the modern day consumer?  Dr. Soh cautioned that the idea of telehealth should not just be transactional in nature but that care can follow the patient – it is about a community of carers that work with the patient. Mr. Besler echoed a similar sentiment: “Telehealth should not just be about the monetary value, it should be about bringing value to patient, allowing them to choose encounters with healthcare based on their time and convenience.”  Although he did not have a direct experience from the perspective of a private healthcare provider in Singapore, Dr. Peng Chung Mien, chief executive officer, Farrer Park Hospital, said that his hospital is currently on a trial with insurance companies to use telehealth for assessment to see if clients need to physically go to an emergency department for treatment. This is in the context in which there are a lot of instances of people going into hospitals’ emergency departments for non-emergency-related cases. He added that the Ministry of Health’s regulation is that the first consultation of the patient with the doctor should always be in-person, and only subsequently followed up with telehealth sessions if required after the relationship has been established. Rethinking the patient experience  The ongoing theme during the panel session was back to the fundamentals in healthcare: how to bring about value, ultimately for patients and how to empower them. In short, how can patients be empowered to have ownership of their care? Mr. Besler shared that it helps to give patients access to their healthcare data and records, empowering them with information and advice, having that constant encounter of care that will improve their experience.  Sharing his perspective from Australia, Mr. Chris Mitchell, executive director of Information Communications & Technology, Hunter New England Health District, said that while it is relatively new, there is a movement toward the tagline "Nothing about me, without me," that is, really putting patients at the centre of care and any decisions being made is made in consultation with the patient. Parking of cars might be an afterthought for hospital design, but one of the patient-centric features that Dr. Peng said is happening at Farrer Park Hospital are parking spaces that allow two cars to park alongside each other yet also accommodate space for wheelchair and lift access.  “I think patient experience assumes a very linear relationship with the patient, one that happens at intervals and transactions in the healthcare model. My dream is that we have a better way to build a relationship with our patients,” Dr. Soh ended the session on a philosophical note.

Agency alleges the company kept customers from using other platforms.

As the cloud IT company continues its post-acquisition merger with Virence Health, the consolidation means job losses for some 200 employees.

Companies say the Diabits Prediction Engine will help chronic care patients and care providers manage their health.

In healthcare, fast access to critical patient data can mean the difference between life and death. If doctors can’t get the patient’s information they need when they need it, the quality of care can be severely compromised with potentially unpredictable consequences. This means that the storage and protection of data is of vital importance in healthcare. Downtime must be avoided at all costs – even in the event of a catastrophic failure, whether that’s a natural disaster or cyberattack. However here’s the problem: storing, securing and intelligently managing data has become increasingly difficult, time-consuming and expensive for healthcare organisations. There are several reasons for this. To begin with, the volume of healthcare data is growing at an astronomical rate, driven in part by necessary efforts at healthcare organisations to digitise all their patient health records. Another driver of data growth is diagnostic devices like CT scanners, MRIs and X-ray machines, which produce massive amounts of imaging data. As these technologies continue to advance, the image files they produce become better, have higher resolution and grow larger and larger in file-size. As hospitals are generally required to store medical images for seven years in accordance with disaster recovery compliance requirements, their image archives are expanding by as much as 40 per cent annually, according to AT&T ForHealth division. The Internet of Things is yet another driver of the data management challenge for healthcare organisations. Connected devices like fitness monitors and in-room sensors all produce their own streams of data, all of which must be stored and managed. Add it all up and the storage demand at even a small medical practice or hospital can quickly reach petabyte-size. However the challenge does not stop there - as the data grows, the time, budget and resources required to store, protect and manage this critical patient data grows as well. What healthcare organisations need is a data management and data protection solution that delivers constant, uninterrupted data availability. In addition to being reliable, the solution must be affordable, so it doesn’t break the budget. This is a huge ask, to say the least. The solution must also guard against ransomware and cyberattacks, because healthcare organisations are increasingly under attack from a growing list of threats. For example, ransomware can infect a hospital’s vital patient data or information systems and hold them hostage. Hospitals are particularly susceptible to this kind of extortion due to their dependence on up-to-the-minute information from patient records. Without quick access to their information systems, hospitals simply cannot do their job. For hackers, hospitals are a great target because they can’t risk the lives of their patients and are therefore much more likely to pay ransom. This is partly why healthcare suffered more ransomware attacks than any other industry in 2017, according to a report from global cybersecurity insurance company Beazley. The report found that 45 per cent of all ransomware attacks in 2017 were aimed at the healthcare sector. The good news is that the market offers solutions designed to handle the ever-increasing amounts of healthcare data securely and cost-effectively, ensuring that quality care is never jeopardised by lack of access to vital information. Here are five ways healthcare organisations can protect themselves against the triple threat of out of control data costs, system downtime and loss of data integrity: 1: Look for converged primary and secondary storage To properly deal with explosive data growth, healthcare facilities need an approach that delivers comprehensive storage and data protection services in a single, integrated and easy-to-use solution. By integrating primary, secondary and cloud data-management capabilities, healthcare organisations can eliminate storage and data protection silos while decreasing the risk of any downtime. 2: Benefit from cost-effective, scale-out storage Small and medium-size healthcare practices and hospitals face many of the same data challenges as very large healthcare providers, but they have fewer resources and smaller budgets available. That’s why they need scalable storage that will adapt to their data needs. Healthcare organisations should be able to start with a single node with a few terabytes of capacity, then seamlessly and non-disruptively scale to multiple petabytes with zero configuration or application changes. 3: Protect against data degradation Medical images, in particular, are highly vulnerable to data degradation. The silent corruption of data in medical images caused by bit rot is a significant concern. The problem is compounded because legacy systems store images such as X-rays to a picture archiving and communication system and may not detect if data has been compromised. As a result, the information read from the legacy storage system may be corrupt and unusable. Healthcare organisations need modern data solutions that can guard against this kind of data degradation. 4: Inoculate against ransomware Data protection is a top priority for healthcare organisations as they battle against the constant threat of cyberattacks. Healthcare providers need to have strong encryption throughout the data lifecycle without having undue management complexity. The answer to this challenge is immutable object storage. Modern healthcare organisations solve this issue by implementing a storage solution that protects information continuously and takes data snapshots every 90 seconds. Because the object store is immutable, these snapshots remain completely unaffected in the event of an attack. As a result, healthcare organisations can recover the most recent version of data, and thus thwart any ransomware attack. 5. Insist on a tangible ROI Cyberattacks are increasingly common and as a result, hospitals are seeking insurance policies that provide coverage in the event of a data breach or loss. As every medical record is assigned a dollar value by insurance companies as part of the risk assessment, this can quickly add up to tens of millions of dollars in premiums. However, these insurance premiums can be reduced when hospitals can demonstrate they have effective data management and protection strategies in place. Recently, one healthcare provider was facing a $22 million insurance premium, but was able to reduce this premium by deploying an appropriate data management and protection solution, thereby delivering immediate ROI on the project from day one. With the right data management solution, healthcare facilities can not only protect their data and decrease costs, they can better treat their patients and ultimately save more lives. Florian Malecki is the Senior International Director of Marketing at StorageCraft.