BurstIQ Brings $90 Million Case Study to Blockchain Through Intermountain Healthcare Spin-Off Empiric Health

Nov 14, 2017

DENVER, Nov. 14, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BurstIQ, Inc., a leading healthcare blockchain data company, announced today the first mainstream OEM blockchain data record integration for Intermountain Healthcare with strategic partner Empiric Health. The Utah-based healthcare giant has already realized more than $90 million in savings using the Empiric technology (formerly known as ProComp) to identify operational efficiencies across the Intermountain Healthcare system. BurstIQ's proprietary blockchain-based big data platform enables Empiric to securely manage customers' data at scale and perform advanced analytics using the platform's machine learning and collaborative intelligence capabilities. Moreover, this marks the first time healthcare data and records have been stored and managed on blockchain, making BurstIQ's proprietary blockchain platform the industry's leading HIPAA-compliant secure data platform.

The inherent benefits of blockchain can now be leveraged by large enterprises seeking more secure alternatives to traditional data management systems. The adoption of the BurstIQ platform by mainstream enterprise-level institutions marks a long-awaited proof point for the blockchain industry.

Empiric Health will use the BurstIQ platform to securely manage clinical and operational data and to perform advanced analytics using the platform's machine learning capabilities. "The BurstIQ blockchain platform enables us to take our analytics capabilities to a deeper level - and to do it at scale," says Rick Adam, CEO of Empiric Health.

Frank Ricotta, CEO of BurstIQ, sees the partnership as a critical piece of the company's long-term vision. "Our goal is to help providers, health systems, companies, researchers and consumers get the most out of their data, and our partnership with Empiric Health fits perfectly with this goal. Their methodology has a proven track record of reducing costs and improving clinical outcomes for large health systems, and we're helping them take it to the next level. It's a natural fit."

Source: Global News Wire (View full article)

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To master cybersecurity, design systems around employee workflows

Nov 14, 2017

Source: Healthcare IT News

For nearly two years, the healthcare sector has been in the crosshairs of cybercriminals, thriving on outdated systems and banking on humans to open the door. In fact, in 2015, 60 percent of breaches were caused by insiders, according to the IBM 2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index.

It's an issue well-known to healthcare's security leaders. However, it creates a major issue: How can an IT team build a well-secured system, while making sure it doesn't interrupt clinicians' ability to care for their patients?

Consumer-centric security

For Marin General, a standalone community hospital, just north of San Francisco, it was easy: Focus on people.

Marin didn't need to start from the ground up during its security upgrade in Jan. 2016, as it has the obvious tools in place like firewalls, antivirus and the like, according to Marin's CISO Jason Johnson. But the systems were disparate and needed to be brought under a unified umbrella.

Typically, when security managers begin a project like this, they look at the current technology and focus on filling in the gaps, explained Johnson.

"But we took a different approach to focus on the person and people because we knew that would the hardest needle to move and the most difficult to change," said Johnson. "We started to focus on the people in parallel to the tools in the stack."

His team started an e-learning, webinar-style orientation during the workday, for which his staff was compensated. Johnson explained training didn't just include PowerPoint slides and lectures on HIPAA. Rather, there were games and rewards, coupled with education about the real cost of a breach. Security awareness training is required annually for Marin, and it's integrated within new employee orientation.

His team also partnered with marketing, which created ads for a bug bounty program called Security Sleuths. The program rewards its staff members who report phishing emails or concerns to the IT team.

"I thought it would be gimmicky, but the gamification really spoke to people in a way I didn't anticipate," said Johnson.

Johnson's team also makes sure to have a visible presence and face. So that when staff has a pressing question, they know it's easy to reach out to is team for an answer before they make a mistake and, for example, click on a malicious link.

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Source: Healthcare IT News (View full article)

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Three crucial skills for healthcare leaders in turbulent times

Nov 14, 2017

Source: Managed Healthcare Executive

The one constant in healthcare is that industry leaders must enter their roles with the understanding that little in the field ever remains the same. "We are an inherently complex industry and we shall always be complex, that's just who we are. Any leaders need to accept this degree of complexity and the ambiguity that goes with it," says Peter B. Angood, MD, FRCS(C), FACS, MCCM, chief executive officer and president of the American Association for Physician Leadership. "It's an ever-changing environment, so just being able to know and expect that is important."

It's one thing to say that this volatile time in healthcare presents special challenges, but Angood says that's just the name of the game. "We tend to say this is a very complex time in healthcare and there is dynamic change, but the inference on those types of comments is that there's some kind of outcome at the end of this," he says. "There's no new plateau, it's who we are as an industry so let's just get comfortable with it."

Healthcare leaders must be able to provide a strategic vision and interpret which new trends in this changing environment are a good fit for their organization, says Angood. "It creates kind of an innovative and entrepreneurial approach to things, to not react to everything that comes by. Not everything needs to be followed, but important trends need to be picked up on," he says.

The ability to effectively support the frontline

"The increasing focus on patient experience and shared decision making is an important trend that many say is long overdue, but it also requires a significant amount of change," says Angood.

The challenge of improving patient experience from a leadership perspective is to better manage patient-centered care and shared decision making while also helping patients understand the complexity of healthcare, he says. Leaders need to create an environment that allows patients to have an active role in their healthcare and have a good experience while also making them realize that what is good for them may not always be what they want.

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A strong awareness of organizational goals, position

DeChant believes that crucial healthcare leadership skills aren't completely centered in professional background, but also in mindset. "Right now, things are so uncertain that leaders need to develop organizations that can have the ability and agility to rapidly respond to changing external conditions and have the courage to take actions as they are indicated," he says. "Those are key business skills anyone in [a healthcare leadership position] needs to have."

One example of the importance of organizational awareness is appropriately navigating the growing trend of mergers and acquisitions. Managed care leaders must be well-versed in negotiating, and possibly creating larger market shares. DeChant warns that expansion must be carried out in an exacted and careful manner. "If you have an operation that is managed in a mediocre manner to start with and you acquire another operation, now you have two mediocre managed operations, so you don't give society a benefit. It's really important as organizations combine that they focus on ensuring they have the best possible management system across the entire enterprise."

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The ability to create strong, talented teams

Collaboration is an important component of good management and leadership, and Deborah Torain, senior account manager at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), says it's a critical aspect of helping an organization adapt to an evolving environment. In fact, a 2016 white paper Torain co-authored for CCL specifically points to collaborative patient-care teams as the first essential component of a six-step model to help healthcare entities thrive. To develop collaborative teams, leaders must increase engagement and foster an atmosphere that allows for agility and adaptability.

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Source: Managed Healthcare Executives (View full article)

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Technology Companies Set To Disrupt Healthcare

Nov 14, 2017

Healthcare is struggling to utilize innovative technologies to improve population health, patient experience, outcomes, and data safety because hospitals are slow to adopt. Most hospitals are still trying to make sense of EHRs and have concerns such as interoperability and patient data safety.

The healthcare tech industry is projected to grow by 13.4 percent annually by 2020 and it looks like the top technology companies are noticing the market's potential. Amazon, Google, Apple, and even Microsoft have started to enter the healthcare industry and have the financial resources, technology expertise yet only soft competition.

Let's face it: Current technology companies in the industry will be facing an uphill battle once the giants of the tech world decide to tackle the healthcare and life sciences industries. The Fortune 500 top tech companies have the resources and capabilities to help the industry resolve its problems.

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Source: Health IT Outcomes (View full article)

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Precision medicine clinical decision support system bests oncologists

Nov 10, 2017

The University of California San Diego Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy, working in conjunction with startup CureMatch and UCSD's Supercomputer Center, claims that a precision medicine clinical decision support system provided treatment guidance for a patient after doctors were unsuccessful.

A 57-year old man, in fact, had undergone four previous lines of treatment. Despite surgery for several basal cell carcinomas, he developed brain, bone and liver metastases and was subsequently treated with two separate targeted therapies that are FDA-approved for metastatic basal cell carcinomas, but was non-responsive to these therapies. He also received Gamma knife radiation for brain metastases with good response, and chemotherapy was administered but that response was short-lived.

That's when the UCSD divisions and CureMatch came together, according to Razelle Kurzrock, MD, CureMatch co-founder and chief of the division of hematology and oncology at the UCSD School of Medicine. She also is senior deputy director at the Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy.

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Source: Healthcare IT News (View full article)

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Healthcare spending growth up 4.3% year-over-year in September

Nov 10, 2017

Overall national healthcare spending was 4.3 percent higher in September than in the same month a year ago, according to an analysis from Altarum.

Altarum primarily attributed the rise in healthcare spending growth to slow hospital spending growth. According to the analysis, dental services spending growth increased 6 percent in September compared to the same month last year, while hospital spending growth only rose 1.9 percent year-over-year in September, the lowest since September 2011.

The analysis also found overall healthcare price growth dipped to its lowest rate since December 2015. Altarum said healthcare prices rose at a 1.1 percent annual growth rate in September, the lowest rate since 0.9 percent nearly two years ago.

Altarum said the drop in healthcare price growth was "largely impacted by health policy uncertainty and structural health sector changes."

Source Altarum via Becker's Hospital Review (View full article)

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How AI is transforming healthcare and solving problems in 2017

Nov 10, 2017

The adoption of artificial Intelligence in healthcare is on the rise and solving a variety of problems for patients, hospitals and the healthcare industry overall. Take a closer look at how AI is solving problems and what's on the horizon for the industry in the next 5 years. We update this slideshow periodically as we learn more about out how the tech is being put to use in HIT.

Source: Healthcare IT News (View full article)

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Using Natural Language Processing to Revitalize Physician Documentation

Nov 9, 2017

In health IT circles, from the federal government level down to the physician practice level, the conversation about reducing the ever-increasing clinician burden has ramped up in the past several months to the point that it's become one of the most highly-discussed industry issues. While doctors complaining about electronic health records (EHRs) is nothing new, and has been covered ad nauseam in both the trade press and the mainstream media, their levels of frustration have gained significant momentum of late.

Those who attest that EHRs create more work for physicians, rather than less, frequently point to a study published in the fall of 2016 in the Annals of Internal Medicine that got a massive amount of attention amongst health IT folks. Researchers for this study concluded that for every hour physicians provide direct clinical face time to patients, nearly two additional hours is spent on EHR and desk work within the clinic day. And, outside office hours, physicians spend another one to two hours of personal time each night doing additional computer and other clerical work. In an accompanying editorial published in the journal, Susan Hingle, M.D., from SIU (Southern Illinois University) School of Medicine, wrote, "[Christine] Sinsky and colleagues confirm what many practicing physicians have claimed: Electronic health records, in their current state, occupy a lot of physicians' time and draw attention away from their direct interactions with patients and from their personal lives."

What's more, Hingle also noted in her editorial that half of the practices studied had documentation support services (dictation or a documentation assistant) available to physicians. To this end, findings from another recent study revealed that dictation and natural language processing (NLP)--a technology that allows providers to gather and analyze unstructured data, such as free-text notes--may be helpful in reducing these burdens.

Source: Healthcare Informatics (View full article)

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3,200 Phishing Kits Shows Fraudsters' Inner Workings

Nov 9, 2017

Duo Security recently discovered more than 3,200 unique phishing kits that offered insights into how cybecriminals are using them to steal from each other.

The report, titled "Phish in a Barrel," is based on a search across more than 66,000 URLs that had been compromised via phishing kits. Developed by fraudsters and often made available for sale to other cybercriminals, these kits typically include PHP scripts that can be used to steal usernames and passwords, along with a clone of the intended victim's login page.

The report detailed a common technique to evade security services in which malicious developers embed an htaccess directory configuration file within the phishing kit. This is essentially a list of URLs belonging to police or vendors from which the attackers want to hide the phishing folder. There was also evidence that more cybercriminals are using the same kits over and over again.

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Source: Security Intelligence (View full article)

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Researchers Develop Model to Predict Patient Responses to Immunotherapy

Nov 9, 2017

A team of researchers from New York City-based Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai created a mathematical model to predict how cancer patients will respond to various immunotherapies.

To create the model, the researchers used data from melanoma and lung cancer patients who were being treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors. The model captures aspects of a patient's tumor evolution and the underlying interactions the tumor had with their immune system to predict how they will respond to immunotherapy.

The researchers said the model has the potential to help physicians identify therapeutic targets within a patient's immune system and to help scientists develop vaccines for patients who don't respond to immunotherapy.

"This approach will hopefully lead to better mechanistic predictive modeling of response and future design of therapies that further take advantage of how the immune system recognizes tumors," said Benjamin Greenbaum, PhD, the senior author of the study, which was published in Nature. Dr. Greenbaum is affiliated with the departments of medicine, hematology and medical oncology, pathology and oncological sciences at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine.

Source: Becker's Hospital Review (View full article)

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