Privacy & Security

The pandemic has highlighted the importance of cybersecurity and digital transformation, argues Dr Charles Alessi, chief clinical officer at HIMSS.

As opportunistic attacks ramp up, the groups offer recommendations for VPNs and cloud-based services, coronavirus-themed phishing emails, telehealth deployments, and medical device security.

"Cyber criminals will use a time of crisis to cover some of their actions in a very opportunistic way. And so we try to track and match our operations and vigilance to that."

The cybersecurity program will be made available to hospitals, clinics, labs, frontline providers, device manufacturers and life sciences companies that are researching treatments.

Experts from Pew and Accenture discuss the challenges of patient matching, and describe how biometrics technologies can help.

Physicians are now allowed to care for patients at rural hospitals "via phone, radio or online communication, without having to be physically present."

Covered entities and their cloud-service providers both have jobs to do when it comes to protecting hosted patient data – and have to strike a balance deciding who does what.

While European governments look to digital health technology for ways to speed up their containment strategies, the long-term view is that the COVID-19 emergency will generate new approaches to sharing healthcare data once the pandemic has passed.