Chronic conditions on the rise, according to United Health Foundation. The non-profit philanthropic arm of UnitedHealth Group released its annual America’s Health Rankings 2023 report. The report considers 87 measures from 28 distinct data sources for 2022. Topline results in their summary are concerning. Eight chronic conditions reached their highest level in AHR’s tracking history: arthritis, depression, diabetes, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and chronic kidney disease (CKD). 29.3 million adults, or 11.2% of the population, reported having three or more chronic conditions. During 2021 and 2022, depression rates grew to 21.7% or 54.2 million... Continue Reading
Search Results for data breaches
23andMe hacking may have affected 6.9 million+ users–not 14,000–in massive PII breach
...data sharing with a partner, MyHeritage, in adding functionality to Family Tree. It seems clear that credential stuffing wasn’t the only technique used to break into the 23andMe user data. 23andMe, as well as Ancestry.com and MyHeritage, now require or strongly recommend two-factor authentication for access to personal accounts. About time. They have also changed terms of service to “encourage a prompt resolution of any disputes”. What is distressing is that the hacks on the retail side of 23andMe are only the tip of the iceberg–that the really valuable part of their genetic data goes to pharmaceutical companies. Cyberthieves know... Continue Reading
Has Amazon lost its ‘edge’ in healthcare? Or finally seeing reality?
...And $3.9 billion later, there is One Medical, acquired earlier this year. It has never made money and won’t for at least two fiscal years. It doesn’t resemble an Amazon-style delivery model either. It’s a membership model practice group with individual paying members plus 9,000 corporate service contracts and telehealth. Of course, memberships including telehealth are being offered to the millions of Amazon Prime members at a drastically discounted rate starting earlier this month. Bubbling under this is Amazon Clinic, an asynchronous virtual consult service leaked in November 2022, formally announced in June 2023 but delayed until August on data... Continue Reading
Another turkey: potential 9M patients affected by medical transcription vendor data breach
Vendors are hot, hot, hot…with hackers. In another notable vendor data incident, Perry Johnson & Associates (PJ&A), a Henderson Nevada-based provider of transcription services for hospitals and physician practices, reported a data security incident to the US Health & Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) on 3 November. The breach occurred in the network and files were copied 27 March-2 May, when it was detected. 8.95 million individuals were affected, with over 4 million individuals in NYC and Syracuse at Northwell Health, the largest health provider in New York State, and Crouse Health. Northwell hasn’t had much luck... Continue Reading
A Thanksgiving turkey for hospitals: multiple cyber and ransomware attacks
...not affected. Ardent has reported this to law enforcement and in their release, stated they are still determining the full impact of the event, though working with partners to restore access to electronic medical records and operations. In addition to the Ardent hospitals, on Thursday the six-hospital Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Nashville, Tennessee) reported a cyberattack that compromised a database and was contained. Ransomwareistas Meow claimed that their information was leaked on the dark web. VUMC is not confirming a ransomware attack and stated that the “compromised database did not contain personal or protected information about patients or employees.” Becker’s... Continue Reading
New York State drafting proposed cybersecurity regulations for hospitals, allocates $500M for upgrades
...indeed. NYS release, MedCityNews This Editor attended the Official Cybersecurity Summit New York 2023 last Friday, with a security briefing by NY State’s deputy chief cyber officer for operations, Jesse Sloman. He described the overall strategy of the state agency, the first ever, as building a unified, resilient, and prepared cybersecurity strategy across all agencies in the state, with a single point for operations including law enforcement, military, transportation, and of course healthcare. Certainly, internally instigated breaches, ransomware attacks, DDOS, and nation-state/transnational cyberattacks by Russian ransomwareistes like CLOP are expensive. He quoted a five-year loss of $27.6 billion with 3.2... Continue Reading
News roundup: AstraZeneca’s Evinova to market clinical trial health tech; BehaVR-Fern merge; UpHealth sells Cloudbreak telehealth translation; MedwebX launches; Tunstall-UEdinburgh research partnership; NextGen loses 84 after going private
...[TTA 29 Sep], Behavioral Health Services (BHS), and Thrasys, Inc., but not the publicly traded UpHealth Inc., which closed today on the NYSE at $0.79 having just resumed trading (Yahoo Finance, UpHealth release). Reportedly UpHealth will be refocusing on addiction treatment services provided in South Florida. More on their complex financials in their Q3 report. Release Short takes: Digital medical imaging and storage company Medweb announced MedwebX, a HIPAA-compliant solution designed for sharing imaging, studies, data, and reports across networks. Release Oracle’s moves into Music City Nashville [TTA 2 Nov] continue with the announcement of the Oracle Health Summit on... Continue Reading
Primary care provider Forward introduces CarePod kiosks, raises $100 million for deployment–but will it work this time?
...commenter with a far dimmer view than this Editor’s is quoted at length in today’s HISTalk. “The target audience seems to be young, worried well people who prefer faceless machines and tons of prevention-focused data or congratulatory test results to interacting with a clinician. That actually is a pretty good business model. Reviews for the company’s in-person clinics are almost all from customers in their 20s and early 30s.” But the commenter–a customer–is dissatisfied with being completely unable to get someone on the phone, everything done through chat, and wait times to see a real doctor upwards of two weeks.... Continue Reading
Roundup: Virgin Pulse, NextGen close fast; Elucid, Eleos, Vida, Neteera funding; One Medical-CommonSpirit; Indian Health $2.5B EHR to General Dynamics+Oracle; losses, layoffs at Cano Health, 15% digital cuts at Mass General Brigham
...Release Also Mobihealthnews on Elucid, Eleos, and Vida. Israeli RPM company Neteera now has an additional $6.7 million as part of a Series B extension. Their unique RPM uses sub-THZ radar to monitor vital signs through bedding and clothing, then analyzes the data and produces reports on its platform. Neteera partners with Foxconn on their RPM and currently sells to long-term care facilities in the US. Pulse 2.0 Amazon’s One Medical announced a partnership with CommonSpirit Health’s Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (VMFH) in the Seattle Puget Sound metro. This will add integrated specialty care in that area to One Medical’s... Continue Reading
Early news roundup: Envision exits Ch. 11, splits; Walgreens’ new CIO; Philips’ $60M from Gates Foundation; more on Walmart-Orlando Health partnership; Cigna may sell MA business
...to the exclusive report by Reuters (may be paywalled), Cigna is in early stages, at this point consulting with an investment bank. Cigna is not much of a player in the difficult state-by-state, county-by-county MA business, with 599,000 members as of 30 September, which is about 3% of their 19 million total insurance members. But it has been problematic, with Cigna recently paying CMS $172 million to settle allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by submitting incorrect data to obtain higher payments. By comparison, UnitedHealthcare and Humana have nearly half (47% or 14.5 million) of the national 30.8... Continue Reading
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