The coronavirus pandemic has impacted us profoundly as most nonessential businesses stay closed, and the nations worldwide stay indoors. The hospital staff is under tremendous stress, and all non-critical medical treatments and procedures are on hold until further notice. The pandemic has halted all industrial activity, and the medical field, the frontline warrior against the virus, has been disrupted the most.
Sadly, whether an opportunistic trend or organized crime, critical situations have always given criminals a favorable moment to strike. Owing to their large payouts and increased public interest in it, medical facilities have emerged as a prime target.
Healthcare: A target of organized fraud
While the health sector has always been a dominant area in case of fraud, the situation intensified after the COVID-19 outbreak. One of the biggest battles that the medical facilities needed and still need to combat is the trafficking of substandard and falsified medical products. These items usually included hand sanitizers, test kits, face masks, and other medical equipment. As the demand for such products spiked, criminal activities attempt to take advantage of the public health system’s capacities.
Besides this major threat, healthcare facilities need to prepare their infrastructure for various cyberattacks. The COVID-19 lowered the resistance of many facilities. INTERPOL reports a significant increase in the number of ransomware attacks against companies and organizations that battle the COVID-19 crisis.
Ransomware virus is one of the deadliest infections as it is capable of stealing or encrypting medical data. Then, if facilities want to retrieve the decryption key or prevent the data from being disclosed publicly, they need to pay large ransoms. During this situation, when hospital staff needs to have access to medical records and patient histories, losing all this confidential data can lead to death. Hence, hospitals need to consider whether their infrastructure is capable of resisting a ransomware infection. One of the options is to perform frequent penetration tests. They help organizations discover their weak points and evaluate the resistance against cyberattacks.
Since COVID-19 started causing havoc all over the world earlier this year, things have been tough on the medical industry. There have been massive influxes of people to hospitals with a range of symptoms, hoping to get the best treatment possible.
But, how well equipped is the healthcare system now, and will it be able to withstand a second wave in the current condition it’s in? Right now, that’s debatable, considering not a lot seems to be able to go right when it comes to the pandemic.
The first thing that you’ve got to consider when thinking about how well the healthcare system is equipped is equipment. If you’ve been to hospital recently, or you’ve been reading the news, you might have noticed that one of the main concerns is that there isn’t enough equipment. Keeping patients and staff safe is supposed to be one of the top priorities, but you could be forgiven for thinking it isn’t.
Even if you take out things like masks and special measures for COVID-19 specifically, there was still a lack of equipment before this. If anything, this has gotten worse since the virus hit due to needing more than ever before.
A recent Wall Street Journalarticle pointed to a biased algorithm widely used in hospitals that unfairly prioritized white patients over black ones when determining who needed extra medical help.
While AI has been cited as a data-driven technology that doesn’t make decisions based on emotions, but on actual facts – the reality is that the facts can be misleading.
In the above example, race wasn’t a deliberate factor in how the AI algorithm reached its decision. It actually appears to have used predictive analytics based on patients’ medical spending to forecast how sick patients are.
Yet, the problem is that black patients have historically incurred lower healthcare costs than white patients with the same conditions, so the algorithm put white patients in the same category (or higher) than black patients whose health conditions required much more care
Bias is inherent in a lot of things we do and often, we just don’t realize it. In this case, the data assumed that people who paid more for services were the sickest. As illustrated, we have to be considerate of the data we use to train algorithms, Cost of services or amount paid shouldn’t be information we use to determine who is sicker than another.
In another example, if skin-cancer-detection algorithms are typically trained on images of light-skinned patients, they would be less accurate when used on dark-skinned patients, and could miss important signs of skin cancer. The data must be inclusive to provide the best results.
While AI can accelerate disease diagnoses, bring care to critical patient populations, predict hospital readmissions, and accurately detect cancer in medical images, the example illustrates the caveat: AI bias –whether because of a lack of diverse data, or the wrong type of data – exists in healthcare and it can lead to social injustice, as well as harm to patients.
In addition to racial bias, unchecked algorithms can cause other types of bias as well, based on gender, language or genealogy. In fact, according to IBM research, there are more than 180 human biases in today’s AI systems, which can affect how business leaders make their decisions.
As an example of gender bias in healthcare, for many years cardio-vascular disease was considered a man’s disease, so information was available based on data collected from men only.
This could be fed into a chatbot and lead a woman to believe that pain in her left arm was less urgent – possibly a sign of depression – with no need to see a doctor right away. The consequences of this oversight could be devastating.
By Luke Wilson, vice president of intelligence, 4iQ.
Luke Wilson
In the wake of COVID-19, my firm, 4iQ, observed an increase in a host of cyber-attacks. This uptick did not come as a surprise, given cybercriminals typically exploit uncertain situations, but it was a wake-up call for organizations that were in the midst of transitioning to full-time remote work.
As the country begins to reopen, we cannot let our guards down – from preventing the spread of this pandemic, or from persistent cybercriminals.
Phishing campaigns were well-documented over these past few months. Scammers spoofed credible institutions, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to lure victims into downloading malware or to capture personal or financial information.
These incidents were so widespread that government agencies, including the CDC, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published resources on these COVID-19-related scams to alert the public and offer tips on how to spot suspicious activity. Individuals were also at risk of having their identities spoofed, not just organizations.
Cybercriminals leveraged the accounts of executives with public-facing email accounts, usually via keyloggers or phishing attacks, to conduct fraudulent wire transfer payments.
As COVID-19 continued to spread, so did the number of registered suspicious coronavirus-themed domains. We analyzed over 2,400 domain names with COVID-19 themes and found that the most common terms were “virus,” “coronavirus,” and “corona.”
We also saw particular interest in protection gear, test kits, vaccines, and domains that tracked reported coronavirus cases as well as the status of the infected and cured. While some of these sites might have been legitimate, many were scams to distribute malware, inflict financial fraud, or trick victims into purchasing fraudulent COVID-19-related products, such as “vaccines,” which haven’t been evaluated by regulators for safety and effectiveness.
You may feel safe inside your house from the polluted and unhealthy air outside, but are you? Your house isn’t entirely sealed off from the outdoor air, which means all those pollutants/allergens are easily creeping inside.
One of the ultimate defenses you can use against this unsafe air is an air purifier. In this article, we’ll discuss all the reasons why air purifiers are important for your health.
How Air Purifiers Benefit Your Health
People often undermine the importance of using air purifiers. The truth is, they’re essential for maintaining a healthy living environment. Here’s why:
Asthma Triggers
Asthma is a potentially fatal and serious condition, and you must make sure there aren’t any triggers present inside the house.
But problems arise because a lot of stuff can trigger asthma episodes: pet dander, mold spores, smoke- the list continues. Hence, the only way you can overcome this problem is by using an air purifier, which sucks in the air and filters out harmful particles.
Allergens
Apart from asthma attacks, polluted air can cause different allergies that negatively impact the respiratory system, eyes, skin, etc. Statistics show that over 50 million Americans suffer from allergies each year.
So, what causes these allergies? Dust, pollen, pets, mold spores, and a lot of different stuff. These are things that you don’t have much control over – you can’t stop tiny particles from traveling into the air inside. Unless, of course, you use air purifiers.
An air purifier has various filters and cleaning mechanisms that help eliminate harmful allergens in your house. In fact, they’ve proven to be effective in creating a healthy breathing environment. This is why households with family members susceptible to allergies should use air purifiers.
By William Flood, MD, MS, chief medical officer/Eviti, NantHealth.
William Flood
The COVID-19 crisis has created a perfect storm of challenges for payers as they adapt to a new normal that continues to evolve. It’s also opened up a host of opportunities for creating positive change that will enable providers and payers to run smarter businesses and provide more quality care for patients.
During a recent webinar, healthcare payers participated in interactive polling and unanimously agreed that COVID-19 has significantly changed the healthcare landscape, altering the routine day-to-day management of care and the operations that happen around it, including medical plans.
Here are some of the key aspects payers are tackling as they move forward:
Shifts in Plan Membership
The economic downturn caused by the pandemic has led to significant increases in unemployment, As healthcare coverage is frequently tied to employment, this leads to significant increase in the number of uninsured. According to a May 2020 Kaiser Family Foundation study, 45 million Americas were unemployed at that time, and it’s estimated that about 27 million are uninsured because of that loss.
While we won’t have exact numbers on how much membership has changed until open enrollment periods begin, likely in January 2021, we do know that this increase in unemployment has driven a shift from private to public plans.
It escalates the steady decline in private plans that we’ve seen for the past thirty years, putting increased pressure on government-sponsored plans like Medicare and Medicaid and providing opportunity for insurers who have not already done so to enter these markets. During a time of economic challenge, this requires reevaluation of current processes to construct more valuable and affordable approaches for stakeholders: payers, patients, and providers.
By Rakhee Langer, vice president, healow telehealth solutions, eClinicalWorks.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it sparked revolutionary change across the health care industry, from a more focused need for ongoing communication with patients and telehealth solutions. Practices immediately had to shift their in-office visits to an online presence — changing with the times.
Initially, there was hesitation from both the patient and the provider whether conducting online visits would prove to be on par with in-person visits. However, the concerns surrounding technology adoption were quickly mitigated and both patients and providers found that telehealth was not just easy to adopt but also facilitated a productive medium for care.
During the peak of the pandemic, almost all visits were conducted via telehealth, helping to ensure the safety of both the patient and the provider. It was key to determine which types of visits could be done over telehealth.
We found that providers across all specialties—including neurology, behavioral health, pediatrics and dermatology—found ways to continue providing effective and comprehensive care. Of course, there are exceptions and certain types of visits that require an in-person physical examination.
However, physicians have found that telehealth is an avenue to conduct pre-surgery consults, post-surgery follow-ups and screenings in which it may not require the patient to come into the office. All specialties, including urgent care centers, have begun to use telehealth as well as solutions for check-in and bill payment that limit contact and thus reduce potential exposure to COVID-19.
Operating a healthcare business these days is a constant balancing act between trying to ensure profitability and never compromising patient care in the face of ever-increasing legislation. It’s a tough position, and little wonder that businesses in this sector have some of the highest operating and administration costs.
But when cutting corners could mean the difference, quite literally, between life and death, it can be a challenge to identify areas that could be streamlined.
However, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done at all. There are savings to be made as some processes are extremely wasteful — you just have to approach it with a logical plan and think carefully through all the implications before taking action.
Identify Your Inefficient Processes
The fact is that money is often wasted on the wrong areas, and this can be dangerous when it causes spending to be restricted in other areas which are really key, such as staff training and development. To save money, you also have to know where to spend money, and things like ensuring the right tools for computational biologist and ongoing clinical training are critical.
Where you can take a closer look at ways to increase profitability are areas like administration, where processes are quite often overly-complex and not patient-friendly. Although meeting the requirements of a complex regulatory landscape remains a central challenge for those working in healthcare, we shouldn’t let it become a barrier to streamlining paperwork and administration processes, which can often benefit hugely from a certain degree of automation, especially as software becomes smart enough to easily handle more complicated businesses.
