PWC Health Research Institute has released a Spotlight Brief on the US telehealth (read telemedicine for telehealth) regulation which states that recent regulatory action may be the catalyst to spur the fledgeling telehealth market. Expansions in Medicare reimbursements, Government telehealth grants amounting to several million dollars and legislative action in many States are all seen as supporting new entrants as well as traditional players and growing the US telehealth market that PWC says is estimated as high as $10 billion. Benefit to consumers is of course lower costs and easier access. Challenges mentioned are licensing, reimbursement, privacy and security. Read... Continue Reading
Search Results for data security
Pondering the squandering redux: $28 billion gone out the HITECH window
...programs were delivered through multiple stages of MU benchmarks for hospitals and practices in implementing EHRs, information exchange, e-prescribing, converting patient records, security, patient communication and access (PHRs). Five years on, $28 billion of that $35 billion has been spent–and real progress towards interoperability remains off in the distance. This Editor has previously noted the boomlet in workarounds for patient records like Syapse and OpenNotes. Yet even the progress made with state data exchanges (e.g. New York’s SHIN-NY) has come at a high cost–an estimated $500 million, yet only 25 percent are financially stable, according to a RAND December 2014... Continue Reading
Data breaches top 120 million since 2009 (US)
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Hackermania.jpg” thumb_width=”200″ /]“The medical industry is years and years behind other industries when it comes to security.”–Dave Kennedy, TrustedSEC CEO. We admire the Washington Post for arriving at the conclusion we did in 2010–that healthcare organizations are uniquely vulnerable to cyberattack because of the high value of patient data, and an often lighter level of HIT security. But now we get the finger wag that ‘it’s only going to get worse.’ (Beyond 120 million breached records?) Data security, of which HIPAA patient information protection is a part, wasn’t primary for years, especially in organizations overwhelmed with transitioning EHRs, getting... Continue Reading
EHRs can’t exchange patient records? $$ in workarounds.
...and over 7 million consenting residents, will be fully interconnected as the first large health information exchange in the US. Cost: $45 million this year. NY eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) has been active in coordinating support for this as part of innovation in the tech sector. SHIN-NY support letter to the state legislature. The bad ER/ED experience of a Silicon Valley techie and the search for his tetanus shot records inspired him to start Syapse to create a database out of the unstructured data in medical and genetic information. The Argonaut Project wants to make exchanging health data easier between app... Continue Reading
MWC 2015 Part II – a few companies, some of potential interest
...burglar alarm certification.) They claim to be able to deal with the “grandchildren” effect by effectively turning off alerts if there is evidence of people in more than one room at a time. Fluxtream is “an open-source non-profit personal data visualization framework to help you make sense of your life and compare hypotheses about what affects your well-being”. Works with Jawbone & Misfit, among other health trackers. This reviewer is always a little worried about ‘free’ health track websites, although he has been using TicTrac for a couple of years now without any evident selling of personal data. Hocoma, is... Continue Reading
Smartphone health data, privacy concerns rear head at MWC
As Editor Charles is chronicling at the world’s largest mobile event, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has a great deal of focus on healthcare–and that includes healthcare data security. Both telehealth monitoring and telemedicine virtual consults are increasingly phone-based. That data transmitting via and in virtual storage a/k/a The Cloud, including personal health records (PHRs), is overly assumed to be secure, but security protocols vary. “We are at the mercy of who the app providers are and how well they secure the information, and they are at the mercy sometimes of the cloud providers.” according to Kevin Curran of the... Continue Reading
23andMe’s FDA coup hazardous to personal DNA data security?
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/DNA-do-not-access.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Genetic test developer 23andMe’s wins with the FDA [TTA 20 Feb] served to clear the path for their current Bloom Syndrome and future kits as Class II devices. It’s long been believed that the company’s real diamond mine is in selling the DNA data gained through the kits, and with consent, to major pharma and medical companies. Proof: recent collaboration announcements with Genentech and Pfizer on genetic research. But how will this data be safeguarded? It may not be a significant concern now, but “Personal DNA information will become far more critical and more important to safeguard... Continue Reading
Moving past the hype on mobile, wearables for consumer health
...arguably, more challenging issues to solve. Privacy and security, figuring out which data is relevant and what dependent variables matter, understanding how to effectively incorporate data into decision-making and practice goals like quality, finding which behavioral models work remotely and for which populations etc...Smart tech alone cant solve these problems. 3. I think the assertion that smartphones are primarily a connectivity medium/device makes sense to me - we haven't tested it. I'm not sure its the first health reason though that people use smartphones, but I'd have to research that to find out. Thanks for taking the discussion further. Monique... Continue Reading
Hackermania running wild, 2015 edition
...‘The Third Man’. This article has a remarkably prescient closing, one which the HIT staff at AnthemHealth should have read and implemented–fully–beyond their (wise) engagement of TeraData: Yvonne Li of SurMD takes a fresh and counter-intuitive look over at HITECH Answers that posits that DIY for organizations is not the way to go. Migrating your data to third-party cloud storage partners experienced in ultra-secure storage is a far better choice, as long as it is encrypted start-to-finish and in a failproof way that she describes so that even a non-IT professional can understand. [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/keep-calm-and-encrypt-your-data-5.png” thumb_width=”150″ /]Perhaps it’s time to... Continue Reading
Data breach fail at AnthemHealth: an inadvertent ‘inside job’ (updated)
...security. This adds to the lack of encryption of customer data not shared outside the TeraData database (which falls into a HIPAA loophole) and also to the lack of compartmentalization of that data for extra security. That personal data, not health data, is a treasure beyond compare for hackers: “Compared to credit card information, personally identifiable information and Social Security numbers are worth more than 10x in price on the black market,” says Martin Walter, senior director at RedSeal.” For starters. (NetworkWorld) Data security is key to the reality and perception of patient privacy–and it remains a major concern by... Continue Reading
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