The world is expected to generate up to 181 zettabytes of data by the end of 2025, with healthcare contributing up to 36% of that total. But up to 97% of that data goes unused, trapped in electronic health record (EHR) systems that don’t effectively use, organize, analyze, secure, share, or make accessible the valuable data contained within them. This results in compounding effects on efficiency, decision-making, burnout, and even reliability. For CIOs managing outdated EHRs that don’t meet the
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Health IT & Digital Health-Opinion | Op-Eds | Guest Columns | Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Garbage In, Fatal Out: The Direct Risk of Unclean Data in AI-Driven Healthcare
The healthcare industry has suffered from notorious data-quality issues for decades.
Poor, incomplete data can result in missed opportunities to improve patients’ health and improper treatments, while robust data governance practices build trust and empower the delivery of more precise, life-enhancing care.
In healthcare, there is significant room for improvement in data quality. For example, an Experian survey of healthcare professionals, including chief data officers, clinical data
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How Optimized Print Infrastructure Closes Compliance Gaps in Healthcare
It starts with something simple: a printout that is never picked up. It could be a patient record, a discharge summary, or a treatment plan. In a healthcare setting, where patient data privacy is paramount, an unattended piece of paper on a paper tray could become a significant security risk.
And yet, as hospitals and clinics undergo digital transformation, print is still an unfortunate blind spot in many organizations’ security and compliance strategies. In the face of tightening
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Why Empathy, Not Just More Features, is the Fix for Patient Portals
Patient portals, once heralded as the pathway to empowered connection, have instead become transactional cul-de-sacs. They offer the illusion of convenience for tasks like booking appointments or viewing results, yet they critically fail to enable real communication and genuine listening between patients and providers.
Worse still, they force raw, decontextualized clinical data on already vulnerable patients, leaving them lost in confusion, anxiety, and profound disengagement.
How
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Why Compromised OT Devices are the Biggest Cyber Risk for Hospitals
When a hospital’s connected devices are compromised, it’s more than just data or dollars at risk — it’s patient lives. In recent years, operational technology (OT) devices, such as infusion pumps, ventilators and imaging systems, have become essential to clinical operations. Unfortunately, flaws in these devices and the broader networks they connect to continue to expose hospitals to devastating attacks.
Recent discoveries of vulnerabilities in Siemens and Advantech devices underscore the
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Why Independent Pharmacies are the Future of Personalized Care
Consumers today can get everything on demand and online, from groceries, to streaming content, to their prescriptions. Pharmacy digital capabilities, along with the ability to obtain prescriptions by mail, have grown in response. Yet more than 15 million people still rely solely on their local, independently-owned pharmacy as a trusted resource in their community —not just for medicine, but for personalized care including vaccines, testing services and more. As healthcare goes digital,
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Home Healthcare Safety: The Four Most Dangerous Risks and How to Prevent Them
Home healthcare providers play a vital role in delivering care to patients. However, this unique setting brings a host of dangers that are often underestimated. From ergonomic injuries to transportation hazards, unsanitary environments, and the threat of violence, home healthcare workers face daily risks that demand both awareness and proactive solutions. Here are four of the most dangerous aspects of being a home health provider — and practical steps to help stop them.
Ergonomic
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Why Faster Prior Authorizations Won’t Fix Healthcare’s Real Issues
Few phrases raise blood pressure among doctors and patients like “prior authorization.” Ask any clinician and you’ll hear the same story: delayed treatments, endless back-and-forth, and vulnerable individuals left waiting while paperwork wins the day.
For providers, prior authorizations are a constant drain of time and energy. For patients, they can mean worsening conditions, missed windows for effective treatment, or even care that never arrives at all. And for payers, prior
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Why Delaying the Hepatitis B Birth Dose to One Month Is a Dangerous Mistake
On Friday, September 19th, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) postponed its vote on the hepatitis B birth dose. Since 1992, American newborns have received this shot automatically at birth. ACIP has signaled that it plans to delay hepatitis B vaccination until at least one month of age.
Change is overdue, but this proposed change would represent the worst of both worlds. Giving the birth dose to all kids is problematic, but it means the few who actually need it are
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How Female Bodies Became Political Weapons
Hormones are having their 120th birthday this year—in 1905, British scientist Ernest Starling first coined the term “hormone.” And while so much has developed scientifically since then, so much has stayed the same.
Women and their reproductive systems governed by sex hormones have been pathologized as having “hysteria” for centuries (really–the ancient Greek term for uterus came from the word hysteron). Almost immediately after hormones were discovered, estrogen was named in 1906, after
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