Healthcare news this week was rich with business making moves to raise the bar in patient supervising technology, data security and several firms making sure their always up to date with the latest treatment practices. Here are some of those accounts. What would you think if technology could reduce the chances of a patient having to return to the hospital by almost 50 percent? If you’re using a remote patient monitoring and care management program implemented by Geisinger Health Plan, with technology provided by AMC Health, that’s what’s going to happen, according to a company press release. The source said the program has shown a 44-percent reduction in hospital readmissions.
It all came down to this: a technician’s weak password. What are we talking about? Health records of almost a million people in Utah on Medicaid and in a health care program for low-income children are now in the hands of hackers. 24,000 files were downloaded to computers in Eastern Europe on March 30, many of which containing names, addresses, social security numbers and other confidential personal information, according to a story by Nicole Perlroth.
Zafesoft, a content security provider, announced today a large academic healthcare institution in the San Francisco Bay area is piloting the Zafesoft security solution for persistent, trackable and transparent security for collaboration between the medical center’s privacy and security groups. Content security managers provide access to a structured set of data, including mechanisms for figuring out and enforcing data security.
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) were supposed to markedly improve our lives by providing information to medical professionals wherever and whenever it was needed. A big part of that included images via scans that doctors and patients could discuss over iPads or iPhones while looking right at the picture. But according to a story by Ray Fisman, the picture and image industry has stopped coming out with new products, and there’s a really aggravating reason why. In an unpublished study, Catherine Tucker, an MIT economist who studies the medical IT market, has shown that the slowdown in R&D occurred as a result of litigation.
If you’ve just received a prosthetic heart valve, and your heart is pumping beautifully, you probably don’t care that industry experts predict that the prosthetic surgical heart valve market will soar past $1.3 billion by 2017. You’re just happy to be alive! But that’s what market researchers Global Industry Analysts say will happen in the next five years.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
