Tag Archives: technology

Navigating the brave new world of artificial intelligence

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Rebecca Vesely

About Rebecca Vesely

Rebecca Vesely is AHCJ's topic leader on health information technology and a freelance writer. She has written about health, science and medicine for AFP, the Bay Area News Group, Modern Healthcare, Wired, Scientific American online and many other news outlets.

You might be receiving a lot more PR pitches about artificial intelligence (AI) in your inbox these days. Gideon Gil, managing editor of Stat, has. Gil moderated a panel at Health Journalism 2018 on AI that aimed to help reporters and editors distinguish between hype and reality.

Briefly, AI is an artificial system that can perceive its environment and takes independent action to produce a result. AI products typically demonstrate behaviors associated with human intelligence such as learning, planning, movement and problem solving. Continue reading →

What to ask hospitals about medical device hacking preparedness

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Rebecca Vesely

About Rebecca Vesely

Rebecca Vesely is AHCJ's topic leader on health information technology and a freelance writer. She has written about health, science and medicine for AFP, the Bay Area News Group, Modern Healthcare, Wired, Scientific American online and many other news outlets.

Photo: Pia Christensen/AHCJMay Wang, chief technology officer at cybersecurity firm Zingbox, said that connected medical devices often are not used efficiently.

It’s only a matter of time before a patient is harmed through medical device hacking, and journalists have many resources to probe whether their local health providers are able to prevent or respond to such an event, said a panel of experts at Health Journalism 2018 in Phoenix.

To date, there are no documented cases of patients harmed by medical device hacking, said panel moderator and independent journalist Mark Taylor. But reporters should be asking their local hospitals about this specific cybersecurity threat. Continue reading →

Is the ‘medical virtualist’ specialty coming to a health system near you?

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Rebecca Vesely

About Rebecca Vesely

Rebecca Vesely is AHCJ's topic leader on health information technology and a freelance writer. She has written about health, science and medicine for AFP, the Bay Area News Group, Modern Healthcare, Wired, Scientific American online and many other news outlets.

Photo: Roy Blumenthal via Flickr

The Journal of the American Medical Association not long ago published an online editorial by two physicians at NewYork-Presbyterian that called for the creation of a new medical specialty focused on virtual care.

Others expanded on this idea in a blog post last month on the Health Affairs website, calling for a “virtualist movement“ that involves not just physician specialists but whole care teams devoted to virtual care. This virtual team would include nurses, pharmacists, medical social workers, psychologists, nutritionists and physical therapists. Continue reading →

A Politico editor mines tech expertise for real-world tale

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Susan Heavey

About Susan Heavey

Susan Heavey, (@susanheavey) a Washington, D.C.-based journalist, is AHCJ’s topic leader on social determinants of health and curates related material at healthjournalism.org. She welcomes questions and suggestions on resources and tip sheets at determinants@healthjournalism.org.

Arthur Allen’s piece, The ‘Frequent Flier’ Program That Grounded a Hospital’s Soaring Costs, ran recently as part of Politico’s What Works series. Allen leveraged his IT expertise to report out a broader piece on health information technology efforts in Texas.

Like many journalists in Washington, D.C., Arthur Allen knows his jargon.

As the editor for Politico’s eHealth, Allen is all too familiar with the trappings of Congress and the resulting litany of regulations and rules that follow any major health-related legislation, including a 2009 bill that aimed to encourage doctors and hospitals to invest in information technology. Continue reading →

Takeaways for journalists from health IT’s biggest event of the year

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Rebecca Vesely

About Rebecca Vesely

Rebecca Vesely is AHCJ's topic leader on health information technology and a freelance writer. She has written about health, science and medicine for AFP, the Bay Area News Group, Modern Healthcare, Wired, Scientific American online and many other news outlets.

Photo: Courtesy of HIMSS

The largest health IT event of the year dropped into Las Vegas last week and brought along more than 43,000 attendees. The HIMSS conference is where chief information officers, chief medical information officers and other health care techies who usually toil in relative anonymity get to be rock stars for a week.

HIMSS – the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society – is a leading voice in advancing and educating about technology in the health sector. Its annual conference is the must-attend event for those working in health IT and digital health.

There are a lot of great health care stories that come out of the HIMSS conference. Continue reading →