In the early chaos of the coronavirus pandemic, the healthcare industry struggled to keep up with an influx of patients amidst a shortage of necessary resources. During this time, healthcare staff naturally prioritized the health and safety of their patients, but this led to a marked decline of cybersecurity measures, leaving themselves open to attacks.
Cybercriminals took advantage of the opportunity, and since the start of the pandemic to late 2020, cyberattacks on healthcare firms in the
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
How AI is Enabling Next-Generation Insights from Biomedical Data
COVID-19 caught the world off-guard, sending governments, populations, and the entire healthcare community — physicians, nurses, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers included — scrambling to discover and deliver rapid solutions as millions of lives hanging in the balance.
The heroic efforts of everyone involved have at last brought the end into view; now, as we begin to emerge from the pandemic and are able to assess its long-term impact, one important
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3 Ways Healthcare Orgs Can Work to Prevent Insider Security Threats
Though it’s often “highly sophisticated” or “nation-state” attackers that make headlines, the truth is that healthcare’s most overlooked cybersecurity threats are within the IT ecosystem. In fact, according to Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, nearly 40 percent of all global security incidents in 2020 were caused by inside actors. These insider threats are often not malicious in nature, but accidental errors, such as employees clicking on phishing links, using weak passwords, or
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Ransomware in Healthcare: The Costly Reality of Withstanding Hackers
How much larger a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) can healthcare command?
This isn’t a rhetorical question, even if it may be difficult to come up with a direct answer. After all, between 1960 and 2018, healthcare increased as a percentage of GDP from a modest 5 percent to more than triple that at almost 18 percent. Over that time period, healthcare economists noticed the rise in healthcare costs and regularly rang the alarm bells with increasing levels of concern.
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Why The Future of Healthcare Coverage is State-Based Exchanges, and It’s a Promising Road Ahead
It is essential for Americans to have a streamlined and cost-effective path to obtain and retain healthcare coverage.
Recent events, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the devastation it brought to our healthcare and economic systems, continue to underscore the catastrophic impacts of not providing such an option – and this has been upheld by the Supreme Court in their recent decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
It’s an exciting time for us as Health IT
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How Technology Is Powering the Future of Personalized Health
Unprecedented innovation and collaboration across the healthcare industry in the past year has presented a clear direction towards a patient experience that is precise, personalized, and human. The consumer-first mindset and the digital technologies that transformed e-commerce are changing healthcare as we know it— transforming patients from passive recipients of clinical services to active participants in their own health.
Healthcare consumers are becoming beautifully and wonderfully
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How Health IT is Helping Hospitals Achieve Faster Patient Transitions and Reduce Length of Stay
COVID-19 served as a brutal reminder that streamlining patient transitions from one care setting to another is critical – and even more so when hospital beds are at a premium. Even with less revenue flowing in, hospitals were still expected to quickly adapt as rising infections caused unexpected surges in hospitalizations. Better care coordination improves the patient experience and significantly lowers hospitals' costs by reducing the length of stay. In fact, one healthcare organization
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Risk Mitigation: Strengthening Trust in AI for Healthcare
Better clinical decision support, population health interventions, patient self-care, and research - these are just a few of the promising use cases of artificial intelligence (AI).
In addition to its benefits, AI can introduce risks that could potentially undermine trust in AI solutions and need to be addressed. These risks include, among others, promulgating bias inherent in source data; a lack of minimal transparency in computation algorithms; AI performance in a “lab setting” not
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4 Key Constraints Preventing Healthcare from Proper Cybersecurity
Healthcare was created to help people. So why is this industry the most heavily targeted by cybercriminals and ransomware attacks?
In the first half of 2020 alone, the Department of Health and Human Services saw a nearly 50% increase in the number of healthcare-related cybersecurity breaches. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the healthcare industry to operate at a level that it wasn’t prepared for, which meant emergency facilities were erected without proper security measures in place in order to
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Cloud Technology and Healthcare Evolution: Microsoft in the Spotlight
In April, software giant Microsoft made a lot of headlines announcing its multibillion-dollar acquisition of Nuance, the cloud-based clinical intelligence developer best known to healthcare providers for its Dragon and PowerScribe speech-recognition products.
Business analysts and reporters zeroed in on impressive financial details and utilization potential for “ambient AI” technologies in health settings. But more than anything, the deal shows how serious Microsoft is about its healthcare IT
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