Long-term effects of COVID-19 pandemic on health care likely will include having a mix of in-person and virtual care, more home care and monitoring, and increased reliance on cloud-based platforms, experts told the virtual CHIME21 Spring Forum. Cook Children's Health Care System CIO Teresa Meadows said the pandemic will lead to greater consumerization of health care, with a focus on health literacy and care provided outside hospital and office settings.

Health care stakeholders need to improve on four major health IT areas to advance precision medicine, according to an ONC blog post. Recommended strategies include improving data standardization, establishing strong health IT infrastructure, integrating precision medicine data into EHR systems, and developing policies to protect patient data.

A 10-member multidisciplinary team of health information and informatics specialists that collected and prioritized EHR optimization requests was able to get some problems fixed immediately through additional training. The team was able to get other problems solved quickly by updating order sets, adding documentation templates and creating autotext, and a majority of clinicians said the team improved their EHR proficiency.

A deep learning algorithm used to detect the presence of metastatic lung nodules on chest CT scans gathered from 226 patients with breast cancer was able to predict the mortality risk among those with lung metastases, according to a study presented at the American Roentgen Ray Society annual meeting. Researchers also found that the artificial intelligence-based classification and regression tree models created for risk assessment yielded a 0.857 area under the curve for mortality prediction when using clinical-, image- and pathological-based characteristics, and a 0.826 AUC when using maximal nodule size on AI and the total number of nodules.

President Joe Biden's administration has launched a 100-day effort to improve cybersecurity in the US power grid, providing actionable steps for utility owners and operators. The White House is also reportedly expected to soon require US government contractors to report cybersecurity breaches.

National Coordinator for Health IT Micky Tripathi says he is on a quest to educate the health care industry about both the cultural components and technical compliance aspects of new patient data access regulations. "It's about engaging patients in a fundamentally different way, and in a broader way, in a deeper way," Tripathi said.

Sixty-one organizations in 35 states received almost $13 million from HHS' Health Resources and Services Administration as part of its Rural Health Care Services Outreach Program effort to support "innovative and evidence-based approaches tailored to the specific needs of local communities." Acting HRSA Administrator Diana Espinosa said the program aims to "improve the health of the nation's underserved and vulnerable rural populations and expand access to comprehensive, culturally competent, quality primary health care services."