Photo by jfcherry via Flickr
The first rule of health care cybersecurity is you don’t talk about health care cybersecurity.
In reporting on cybersecurity threats, journalists will likely encounter resistance from hospitals, health systems and health insurers to speaking publicly about their readiness and strategies around cybersecurity. Continue reading
Photo: Marcie Casas via Flickr
Cyberattacks on hospitals and health insurers have become a regular occurrence – and breaking news in communities where the breaches take place.
A new tip sheet on health care cybersecurity seeks to help reporters who find themselves covering a cyberattack at their local hospital, medical group or health plan. Typically, the attacked entity will issue a press release with the number of affected patients, approximate date of the attack and response. Continue reading
Photo: Carla K. JohnsonA panel of experts discuss health information technology at an AHCJ Chicago chapter event on March 3 in Chicago. From left: Dr. Arnold “Ned” Wagner Jr., chief medical information officer, NorthShore University HealthSystem; Dr. Diane Bradley, senior vice president, chief quality and outcomes officer, Allscripts; Eric Yablonka, vice president and chief information officer, University of Chicago Medicine; and moderator Neil Versel, an independent journalist.
Yes, technology is transforming health care. No, we haven’t come anywhere close to realizing the vision.
Smooth patient handoffs, data-driven performance improvement and real-time analytics are still mostly dreams, although those ambitions have been talked about for years.
Independent journalist Neil Versel, who specializes in health information technology, moderated a panel on March 3. The AHCJ Chicago chapter event was held at AMA Plaza, the new headquarters of the American Medical Association.
Electronic medical record systems “need to play nicer together so they can use each other’s information as if it was natively generated,” said Arnold “Ned” Wagner Jr., M.D., chief medical information officer of NorthShore University HealthSystem. “Can we talk to each other transparently? Well, partly. The success of communication depends on human behavior and (technology’s) job is to help understand the reality of what motivates people to do things.” Continue reading
On Bloomberg’s Tech Blog, Jordan Peterson has been regularly hammering away and exposing, piece by piece, the privacy concerns that could arise from widespread adoption of electronic medical records. His latest piece addresses medical identity theft, and opens with a simple explanation of just how serious it can be.
Webcast: The status of health IT in your community
Farzad
Mostashari
Join us online on Tuesday, Aug. 7, at noon ET for an exclusive on-the-record conversation with Farzad Mostashari, M.D., national coordinator for health information technology, and other officials with the HHS Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
View and learn how to use an updated “Health IT Dashboard” to find local-level information about where Federal Recovery Act dollars are being spent on health IT programs, the percentage of doctors and hospitals adopting electronic health records, and how many doctors and pharmacies are using electronic prescribing tools.
This is an AHCJ members-only opportunity to learn about health IT and its impact on providers and patients in their own communities.
If your credit card is stolen, it may take a few minutes on the phone with the bank to reverse the fraudulent charges.
But if your identity is stolen and used for medical treatment, it could take a year or longer to undo the damage, a new study released today found. Victims may also get dropped by their insurance provider and end up paying the imposter’s bills just to make the problem go away, potentially to the tune of $100,000 or more.
According to the study, which was commissioned by an identity theft protection outfit, 1.85 million people could be affected by medical ID theft, which is estimated to cost the U.S. economy $41.3 billion this year. According to the article, 41 percent of respondents lost their insurance as a result of the theft, and 45 percent said they simply paid the fraudulent bill in order to make the problem go away rather than commit to the yearlong process of properly resolving it.
And, most, remarkably, Robertson writes, “Thirty-one percent of the survey respondents said they let family members use their information to obtain medical care, up from 26 percent last year. Most said it was because their family members were uninsured, couldn’t afford care or were experiencing a medical emergency.”
Other relevant posts in the ongoing series include:
When we think about the growing demands health reform will place on community health centers (assuming that we are thinking about community health centers at all – and we should be) we tend to think about the shortage of primary care doctors in underserved communities, and the increasing numbers of soon-to-be-insured patients needing such care.
Joanne Kenen (@JoanneKenen) is AHCJ’s health reform topic leader. If you have questions or suggestions for future resources, please send them to joanne@healthjournalism.org. According to the National Association of Community Health Centers, about 20 million patients get their primary health care needs at more than 8,000 U.S. locations. I’ve seen various projections of how that will grow under health reform (depending on fun ding and other factors) but the NACHC says it could double, to 40 million, within another five years.
There’s another aspect to the community health center workforce – one that, frankly, I had never thought about until I got a release about a set of grants a few weeks ago from a small foundation that focuses on community health. The clinics don’t just need doctors and nurses. They need people who can just run the places – who can make appointments and keep records, and do the coding and billing, and handle the health IT, and do health outreach in the community, and the case management. And they need people who speak a bunch of languages and be culturally sensitive. In other words, they need all kinds of people who can do the work necessary for these clinics to become effective “medical homes.”
So the RCHN Community Health Foundation recently announced grants of about $150,000 to $200,000 each to five very different community health groups, in five quite different settings. (On the foundation’s home page you can find links to some of the coverage it has gotten.)
The details vary, but they are developing training programs (which can be done during the work day), partnerships with local schools, community and four-year colleges, internships, outreach to potential entry-level workers who hadn’t thought of this career path, worker retention programs – with an eye both toward their own needs, their workers’ future advancement, and job creation in their communities, including veterans. In some cases, they will be designing their resources and programs with a clear eye toward having them spread, to be available and useful to other clinics, other communities.
Chances are, you won’t be covering these five specific clinics. But the challenges these grants are aimed at exist everywhere and are ripe material for covering:
You – and your reader, listeners, and viewers – may be quite surprised by some of the innovative, change-embracing answers.
