The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) recently released Medical Device Cybersecurity Regional Incident Preparedness and Response Playbook is the agency’s latest step in an ongoing effort to enhance medical device cybersecurity. Though these are merely guidelines and not regulations, it’s imperative hospitals and other vendors dealing with medical devices take them to heart. The FDA’s primary focus is on patient safety related to medical device incidents, but these guidelines could very
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
3 Trends Impacting Digital Health Strategy & Leadership Roles in 2019
As always, this year was full of interesting developments in healthcare. As the year comes to a close, we’ve rounded up three trends that we feel are going to significantly impact the landscape of health tech and digital health in 2019 and beyond. Trends are only interesting if we examine the impact, so let’s hone in on how each of these trends will affect company strategies and hence their leadership roles in digital health.Trend 1: Large-scale mergers and vertical integrationsSince 2015,
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How the Walgreens-VA Partnership Demonstrates the Benefits of EHRs
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), each year in the United States, adverse drug interactions cause more than a million visits to hospital emergency rooms. The CDC also found that 40 percent of negative interactions were preventable. One way to minimize these events is to give pharmacists electronic access to summaries of people’s medical histories so they can better predict how a new medication will affect each person’s health. Walgreens is taking a bold step in this direction
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Technology + Cash Pay Health Solutions = Meeting Hispanic Healthcare Needs
Hispanics represent the nation’s largest and fastest growing minority group and are poised to make up nearly 29 percent of the U.S. population by 2050. Nevertheless, more than one-fourth of Hispanic adults in the United States lack a primary healthcare provider, and a similar proportion report obtaining no healthcare information from medical personnel in the past year. The microcosm of Hispanics accessing healthcare in the United States serves as an example of how the system fails the
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Can A Peace Treaty Between Doctors & EHRs Tackle Physician Burnout?
It may be difficult to recall now, what with the ongoing Cerner deployment and recent challenges that had little to do with technology, but there was a time when the Department of Veterans Affairs was considered the gold standard for healthcare IT.VA was out front with the initial development in the 1970s of the VistA system, which would come to be widely recognized and frequently honored. Indeed, when VA was overhauled in the 1990s, VistA was the primary tool that enabled the success of new
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Why Virtual Care is Vital to Evolving Senior Care in 2019 & Beyond
Virtual care and connected care are vital to evolving senior care. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the year 2030 is an important demographic turning point as all baby boomers will be older than age 65. This will expand the size of the older population so that one in every five residents will be retirement age and aging baby boomers will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. Jonathan Vespa, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau, commented that “by 2035, there will be 78
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How Artificial Intelligence Will Help Transform Personal Health in 2019
Artificial intelligence technology has made great strides in the last decade, with AI models outperforming humans in various tasks, from image recognition to election forecasting to reading comprehension. In the coming years, the range of domains in which AI excels will only expand.One field for which AI promises major disruption in healthcare. This is largely due to three major factors: The incredibly complex nature of the human body and the healthcare system that treats it, and the explosion
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It’s 2018, And We Still Have No Idea If Mobile Health Apps Work
The promise of reduced readmissions and improved health outcomes in patients achieved through the continuous mHealth-powered patient-provider connection is what drives the mobile healthcare market. The increasing wave of attracted investments is expected to boost the market up to $102.35B by 2023. But forecasts alone cannot keep the interest in healthcare app development in the long run. Clinical stakeholders, payers, and consumers altogether need tangible results from mHealth to prove its
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Healthcare Organizations: Leveraging Health IT to Maintain Worker Safety and Compliance
Healthcare workers face more injuries than those in any other sector, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. But many of these incidents – whether due to employee negligence, improper training or an institutional lapse in adherence to workplace protocol – are easily avoidable through strict compliance with OSHA standards and a robust culture of safety across the industry. Healthcare facilities can dramatically improve safety for workers and patients by prioritizing compliance and employing
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SMART on FHIR: Is it Worth the Investment or Just Another Burden for Health IT Departments?
As the healthcare industry continues to shift from fee-for-service to value-based care, data interoperability is increasingly becoming a key concern for providers trying to better engage with patients, improve clinical workflow, and ultimately drive better health outcomes. In fact, more than 70 percent of healthcare financial executives say that data interoperability must improve within the next three years to ensure the success of value-based care.The good news? The potential for secure,
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