Monday Morning Update 12/9/24

Top News

HHS OCR fines Children’s Hospital Colorado $548,000 for HIPAA breaches involving phishing and cyberattacks.

In the first incident from 2020, an IT help desk technician disabled two-factor authentication for a physician’s account and forgot to turn it back on. The 2020 breaches occurred when two employees accepted phony multi-factor authentication requests.

Multi-factor authentication attacks usually involve sending a user a phishing link to a phony login page that looks like the real thing, using the login credentials that they enter to initiate a password reset, and then getting them to divulge the 2FA code that they receive by text message.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents expect HHS to change for the worse under the new administration and leadership. I intentionally didn’t qualify what “better” or “worse” means, allowing respondents to make their own interpretation.

New poll to your right or here:  What OS runs your primary personal cell phone?

Listening: a dazzling remake of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” by Body Count, rapper Ice-T’s 35-year-old heavy metal band. The Tonight Show video shows how good he and his band are at reworking a legendary song after obtaining unlikely permission from the perpetually feuding David Gilmour and Roger Waters. His wall of guitars is searing on Fallon, but the official video features the 80-year-old Gilmour himself – who approved Ice-T’s request and then asked if  he could get involved — reprising the song that he and Waters wrote 50 years ago with a full six minutes of his unmistakable guitar. A lyrical snip:  “You’ve got a TV, a computer, so you don’t care; A roof, some clothes, some food, that’s right, it’s all there; Lock yourself in your house, try to forget about; The millions dyin’ from wars, starvation and drought.” Also deep from life’s experience: new from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (live video here). Cave has pushed through the deaths of two sons to turn grief into hope and reflection on “Wild God,” which takes exuberant advantage of his full band and a choir compared to some sparely accompanied poetry on his last couple of albums.

Pet peeve: websites that won’t let you look at a page until you disable your adblocker, after which it then throws up a paywall lockout.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cardiac imaging Cleerly raises $106 million in a Series C funding extension. The company applies AI to heart CT scans for early detection of coronary artery disease.

Sales

• Four Interim HealthCare agencies will implement Netsmart’s CareFabric EHR in their post-acute care settings.

Announcements and Implementations

Oura enhances its smart rings with Symptom Radar, an “illness warning light” that watches for changes from the wearer’s long-term baseline of pulse, heart rate variability, temperature, and respiratory rate.

OnMed unveils CareStation, a “clinic in a box” system that targets underserved communities. The company says that its product, which offers real-time clinician consultation and tools for measuring vital signs, is being used in five locations. It will be officially introduced next month at CES, where zero attendees have the slightest clue about underserved communities or the systemic health equity problems that a doc-in-a-box can’t overcome.

Other

The Guardian reports that a hospital in Malawi saw stillbirths and neonatal deaths drop by 82% three years after implementing AI-powered fetal monitoring software. Just 10% of the hospital’s delivery doctors have been trained to perform traditional electronic monitoring, so the software automatically alerts them of potential problems. The perinatal solution was donated by PeriGen in collaboration with the global women’s health program of Texas Children’s Hospital.

A HLTH conference expert AI panel unanimously suggests that health systems resist the trend of hiring a chief AI officer. Baptist Health Medical Group CMIO  Brett Oliver, MD believes that organizations need to raise their AI literacy before putting someone in that role, which might send the message that only that person is responsible for AI deployment. His group established a broad AI oversight committee to create a governance structure.

I ran across this magazine cover from 100 years ago, which is even more notably prescient given that TV itself wasn’t invented until a couple of years later. Editor Hugo Gernsback also predicted the next year the use of the “teledactyl,” a feel-at-a-distance device that he described as, “The doctor manipulates his controls, which are then manipulated at the patient’s room in exactly the same manner. The doctor sees what is going on in the patient’s room by means of a television screen.” Gernsback created science fiction as a genre right after this issue ran with his launch of Amazing Stories magazine. Smithsonian Magazine’s 2012 story about him, which features fascinating illustrations, is worth a look for sure.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare IT Leaders sponsors the Third Annual Golf Classic benefiting the Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute Foundation.
• PerfectServe integrates Five9’s customer experience platform and Intelligent Virtual Agent technology with its Operator Console for improved contact center operations.
• Tegria publishes a new case study, “Automated Estimates Increase Accuracy and Transparency.”
• King Abdullah Medical City Makkah in Saudi Arabia upgrades its EHR to the latest version of InterSystems TrakCare.
• Nordic and Benevolence Health partner to support healthcare organizations with the new CMS TEAM bundled payment model.
• Rhapsody publishes a new customer story, “Axia Women’s Health saved $300,000, replacing a standalone API engine with Rhapsody Corepoint.”
• Surescripts offers a new whitepaper, “The Current Landscape of Pharmacy Interoperability.”
• Visage hires Victoria Hibbits as executive enterprise sales director.
• WellSky publishes a new case study, “Client value: The story behind $2M in recovered aged receivables.”

Blog Posts

• Lessons learned from operating Medicare Advantage Clinics (MACs) (Notable)
• The Power of AI: Fueling Organizations and Elevating People Part II (Netsmart)
• 3 Ways to Manage Your Data Like an Asset With the ServiceNow Platform (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Transforming Healthcare with AI: Current Innovations and Future Opportunities (PerfectServe)
• Financial Benefits of Optimized Cardiology Scheduling: Reducing Costs with Efficient Utilization (QGenda)
• Top 6 States for Travel Nursing in 2024 (SnapCare)
• 5 Conversations on QHINs and the National Data Exchange Framework (Surescripts)
• Operations: The Power of Revenue Cycle Management Automation (TruBridge)
• Revenue cycle 101: AI + generative AI in healthcare payments (Waystar)

Contacts

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