What buzzwords make health care CIOs cringe? | WHO warns against overestimating AI's health benefit | Data dashboard guided Texas hospital's pandemic response
Hospital and health system CIOs say some of the most overused, cringe-inducing health IT terms and buzzwords include digital strategy, interoperability, patient centricity, disruption and digital front door. Several said the term artificial intelligence is both overused and misused, diluting its true potential and capability.
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A World Health Organization report titled Ethics & Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health warns about the risks of overestimating the benefits of artificial intelligence in health care at the cost of investments and strategies to achieve universal health coverage. The report, developed by a panel of experts, outlines six consensus principles for ensuring AI works to the public benefit and does not subordinate patient and community rights to commercial interests or government surveillance and social control.
A data visualization dashboard developed at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Texas in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic showed number of cases, number of hospital beds available and personal protective equipment inventory that kept staff informed and helped guide life-saving procurement and staffing decisions, says Scott Harrison, the hospital's chief data officer. "Analytics cannot be just a flashy dashboard that you buy," Harrison said. "It's an investment in developing a program, making it a priority, and allowing it to grow organically from within."
Sending fake phishing emails to see if employees can be tricked is likely counterproductive, argues systems administrator Scott Matteson. CEO Sai Venkataraman of SecurityAdvisor says such "shame culture" tactics tend to position "the internal IT teams negatively in the eyes of the organization's employees, making it more challenging to get people on board with strategic initiatives."
Amazon's HealthLake converts structured and unstructured health data from disparate sources into FHIR format that can be analyzed using the company's SageMaker and QuickSight tools. Google's Cloud Healthcare Data Engine assembles an interoperable, longitudinal patient record that can be used in clinical decision-making, resource allocation, clinical trial optimization and population health improvement.
High-profile US entities are being targeted by hacking group Praying Mantis, which is infiltrating networks via bugs in web apps, Sygnia researchers report. Sygnia's Arie Zilberstein notes that "[d]efending against TG1021 attacks is a tough task," so Sygnia recommends patching servers to address .NET deserialization bugs and monitoring internet-facing environments.
Signify Health is rolling out its Transition to Home program in over 50 hospitals to provide evidence-based clinical and social care coordination services to Medicare beneficiaries to help them transition from hospital to home. The program, which currently supports patients in 10 states, provides services such as risk stratification, social needs and behavior health assessment, and medication review delivered by an interdisciplinary team of clinical and social care coordinators, physicians, nurses and pharmacists, who also coordinate care with the beneficiary's primary care provider.
Bryan Vorndran, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, urged lawmakers not to ban ransomware payments to cybercriminals during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the issue, saying a ban on paying ransoms would set up companies for blackmail. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., warned that cybersecurity regulations may be on the way if "critical infrastructure companies" continue failing to meet basic data protection standards.
