What You Should Know: - President Biden’s administration today announced a historic manufacturing deal between Merck and Johnson & Johnson (J&J), to expand production of J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine. The collaboration will increase manufacture of vaccine drug substance, as well as its fill-finish capacity – two of the biggest bottlenecks facing J&J in the production of its vaccine. - In addition, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will collaborate with Merck
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Escalating Cyberattacks on Healthcare Organizations Highlight Need for Security Interventions
Healthcare organizations have faced continual stress from heavy COVID-19 caseloads in 2020. Cyberattacks on their information networks also loomed as a serious threat, and the pressure to protect data is expected to grow this year, as more criminals target healthcare providers. Protecting patient data from unauthorized access has long been a regulatory prerequisite for healthcare organizations. But increasingly, cybercriminals see profit potential in attacking and crippling their networks,
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Healthcare Metadata Management: 3 Critical Capabilities to Creating A Unified, Automated Approach
The healthcare industry, like many others, has become a data driven industry collecting data from patients, doctors, labs, and payers that are all crucial to patient healthcare diagnosis and outcome. When it comes to research, data can be useful in creating emerging healthcare technological innovations, pharmaceutical discoveries, as well as other advances in the market but it also is accompanied by strong regulatory compliance, like stringent HIPAA laws, that dictate that this data is kept
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Onyx, AMA Innovations Form Collaboration to Build FHIR-Based Messaging
What You Should Know: - Onyx and AMA Innovations partner to rethink ways FHIR-based messaging technology can improve links between healthcare and community-based organizations. - As part of the collaboration, both organizations will jointly
target grant opportunities through HHS’ Administration for Community Living’s
Social Care Referrals Challenge Program. Onyx Technology LLC and AMA Innovations Inc., a technology development subsidiary of the American Medical Association, today
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To Beat COVID-19, We Need A Modern Approach to Public Health Data
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken 270,000 American lives to date, has shined a light on another crisis — the U.S. currently has no standardized system for reporting public health data. Health departments all over the country resort to using paper, fax, phone, and email to transmit and receive critical information, and essential healthcare workers are spending precious time retyping data into systems from printed reports and PDFs. At the heart of this lack of a centralized infrastructure
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HHS Awards $20M in Funds to Increase Data Sharing Between HIEs & Immunization Registries
What You Should Know: - The ONC today unveiled a series of investments to improve
the sharing of health information related to vaccination. - The new investments will provide opportunities to track
vaccination progress, help clinicians contact high-risk patients, and help
identify patients due to receive the second dose of the vaccine. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
acting through the Office of the National
Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) today
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IoMT Is Improving Patient Access: We Must Avoid Creating New Barriers
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is changing the face of healthcare and has the potential to significantly improve patient access as well as system efficiencies. The adoption of telemedicine, for example, spurred on by the Covid-19 pandemic, has spread rapidly. Forrester revised its forecasts to predict that virtual care visits in the United States will soar to more than one billion this year—including 900 million visits related to Covid-19 specifically. Likewise, in the United Kingdom,
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Why Hospitals Should Act Now to Create Clinical AI Departments
A century ago, X-rays transformed medicine forever. For the first time, doctors could see inside the human body, without invasive surgeries. The technology was so revolutionary that in the last 100 years, radiology departments have become a staple of modern hospitals, routinely used across medical disciplines. Today, new technology is once again radically reshaping medicine: artificial intelligence (AI). Like the X-ray before it, AI gives clinicians the ability to see the unseen and has
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Death by Ransomware: Poor Healthcare Cybersecurity
If hackers attack your organization and you’re in an industry such as financial services, engineering, or manufacturing your risks are mostly monetary. But when it comes to healthcare cybersecurity, not only is there significant financial jeopardy, people’s health and wellbeing are also at risk so the stakes are much, much higher. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, there has been an almost 50 percent increase in healthcare cybersecurity data breaches between February
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AHRQ and Google Pilot New Tool to Help Patients Plan for Medical Visits
What You Should Know: - Built-in collaboration with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Google is piloting a new tool to help patients plan for medical visits. - The new Google visit planning tool makes it easy for
patients and those who care for them to privately list and prioritize their
questions in preparation for a medical visit. - The suggested questions, developed by AHRQ as part of its “Questions are the Answer” initiative, is designed to get people thinking
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