Healthcare IT Infrastructure News for IT pros in the Healthcare Industry

Kettering to Deploy Health IT System for Faster EMS, Hospital Links

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Kettering Health Network is implementing a new healthcare IT system designed to speed exchange of patient information between emergency medical service (EMS) personnel and hospitals. Kettering is partnering with ESO to implement a bidirectional data exchange platform that will enable EMS personnel and hospitals to exchange a patient’s...

Lawsuit Alleges No IT Infrastructure Backup Before Sutter Outage

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Sutter Health failed to put in backup health IT infrastructure prior to a massive network outage in May 2018, despite being warned about the risk, charged Stuart James, former chief information service operating officer at the health system in a lawsuit filed July 24 in Sacramento Superior Court. James alleged that he submitted a 124-page...

Browser Flaws Exposed Local Area Networks at Health, Drug Firms

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Vulnerabilities in Chrome and Firefox browser extensions enabled attackers to access local area networks (LANs) of several healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, according to a report by security firm DataSpii. Healthcare and drug companies whose LANs were affected by the security flaws included AthenaHealth, Epic Systems, Kaiser Permanente,...

Improving Medical Device Safety by Collecting Unique Identifier Data

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Including unique device identifiers (UDIs) on insurance claim forms will improve medical device safety, argued Ben Moscovitch, project director for health information technology at Pew. By include these identifiers, faulty medical devices could be discovered more quickly. This will reduce the time for identification and recall of these problem...

VA Needs Healthcare IT Infrastructure to Utilize Health Data

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The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) needs to build healthcare IT infrastructure that can utilize increasingly large amounts of health data on veterans, observed Gil Alterovitz, who was recently appointed as the VA’s first director of artificial intelligence. The right infrastructure will make it easier to share health data assets, in a...

OSF Healthcare, UoI Contribute $50M for Healthcare IoT Research

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OSF Healthcare and the University of Illinois (UoI) at Urbana-Champaign are kicking in $50 million to their Jump ARCHES partnership to fund healthcare IoT applied research. The money will go toward applied research into the use of medical sensors, robots, remote monitors, virtual assistants and other healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) devices and...

Hospital Boards Lack Healthcare IT Expertise, Rely on Consultants

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A disturbing 91 percent of hospital boards rely entirely on consultants for healthcare IT strategy and advice, rather than on the healthcare tech expertise of trustees, a poll of 494 C-suite hospital executives by Black Book Research found. In fact, only 4 percent of hospital board members have direct technology experience relevant to the...

Providers Move to Healthcare Multicloud, Despite Security Concerns

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Healthcare providers continue to move to multicloud environments as part of their digital transformation efforts, with 80 percent of respondents storing sensitive data in the cloud. A full 61 percent of 100 U.S. healthcare IT security professionals surveyed by IDC on behalf of Thales said they have 26 or more software-as-a-service (SaaS)...

VC Firms Invested More Money in Fewer Digital Health Deals

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Global venture capital (VC) firms invested more money in fewer digital health deals in the first half of 2019 compared to the same period last year, according to the latest stats from Mercom Capital Group.  VC firms invested $5.1 billion in 318 digital health deals in the first half compared to the $4.9 billion in 383 deals in first half...

Siemens to Inject $133M into UM’s Precision Medicine Institute

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Siemens Healthineers is ponying up $133 million in medical imaging equipment and supporting health IT infrastructure to the University of Missouri (UM) System’s new NextGen Precision Health Institute. The institute’s new facility in Columbia, MO, will include laboratories, classrooms, and space for faculty and researchers, along with...

St. Luke’s Develops AI-Powered X-Ray System to Detect Collapsed Lung

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St. Luke's University Health Network radiologist Karl Yaeger, MD, and his colleagues have developed the industry’s first x-ray system with an embedded AI algorithm to quickly detect a collapsed lung. This technology is designed to alert a clinical team to a potentially life-threatening collapsed lung within seconds of taking an x-ray at...

MassChallenge Cohort Includes Cloud-based Platform for Clinicians

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MassChallenge, the Boston-based startup accelerator, has selected seven digital health startups for the first cohort of its Houston-based accelerator program, including a startup developing a cloud-based platform that automates professional credit management and verification for clinicians. In all, MassChallenge selected 26 startups across...

Novant Health Migrates Epic EHR To Healthcare Cloud Environment

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Novant Health, a North Carolina-based health system, is migrating its Epic electronic health record (EHR) to a healthcare cloud computing environment to improve efficiencies and meet regulatory requirements. Novant Health was looking for a more predictable cost model and improved business speed and agility for its EHR. It also wanted to avoid the...

NIH Awards SBIR Grant for Algorithm to Fight Hospital Infections

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for development of an algorithm to automate the process of detecting hospital infection outbreaks. The SBIR grant was awarded by NIH’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases to Boston-based Day Zero Diagnostics...

More Healthcare Organizations Plan to Adopt Cloud-First Approach

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A majority of healthcare organizations are ready to adopt a cloud-first approach for their health IT infrastructure, compared with only 23 percent of healthcare organizations last year, according to the annual Cloud Data Security Report by Netwrix. In addition, 34 percent of more than 750 healthcare organizations surveyed by Netwrix this year are...

Remote Attacker Could Manipulate GE Healthcare Medical Devices

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GE Healthcare anesthesia and respiratory medical devices have a firmware vulnerability that could endanger patients by enabling a remote attacker to silence device alarms, alter time and date records, and change the gas composition. This was the warning issued July 9 by the Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems-Cyber...

HRSA Doled Out $243M in Health IT Grants to Health Centers

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HHS's Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) awarded $243 million to health centers in order to upgrade their health IT between fiscal years (FY) 2011 and 2017, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Health centers were established to increase the availability of health services to...

Providence St. Joseph Health to Deploy Cloud-Based Health IT with AI

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Providence St. Joseph Health is developing and deploying cloud-based health IT that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the clinical and care environment at the Renton, WA-based health system. To accomplish this, Providence St. Joseph Health is partnering with Microsoft in a strategic alliance that will use the Azure cloud platform and...

DoD’s Transfer of MTFs To DHA Designed to Improve Patient Access

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The Department of Defense’s program to transfer management of its medical treatment facilities (MTFs) from individual military departments to the Defense Health Agency (DHA) is helping to improve military patient access to care. Under the transfer program, which was mandated by the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, DHA will be...

Investors Pay $4.2B for Digital Health Startups in 2019 First Half

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Investments in digital health startups totaled $4.2 billion across 180 deals in the first half of 2019, putting the market on track to reach $8.4 billion this year, according to the latest data from Rock Health. The projected $8.4 billion would top the record-breaking $8.1 billion in digital health investments last year. This compares with $1.1...