People are, generally, quite good at being in tune with their health and knowing when they are sick and/or might need to see a doctor. This is not so much the case when it comes to dental health, as people will tend to ignore issues and wait until they see their dentist for a regular checkup.
This is dangerous and a mistake because ignoring dental health issues can lead to larger problems and could even impact your overall health as the two are very closely linked. With this in mind, here are a few symptoms and signs that you may need to see a dental health professional.
Lost Or Loose Teeth
A lost tooth or loose teeth should never be ignored, and you should see a dentist as soon as possible as they may be able to save the tooth. Additionally, loose teeth or teeth that fall out is a sign of advanced gum disease, so it is important to see a dental health professional for treatment.
In October 2020 a joint advisory by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI noted there is a “credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat” affecting U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers. A main part of this threat features ransomware attacks, where hackers take control of data and systems to extract ransoms.
The alert detailed the actions of a Russian-speaking group called Ryuk and a type of trojan known as Trickbot. Even more alarming, many healthcare providers might already be infected with malware, with hackers waiting for an opportune time to launch an attack and cripple the organization’s operations.
To prevent successful ransomware attacks, hospital IT and management teams need to implement multi-pronged strategies focusing on training, technology solutions, and other best practices. See below for a few actionable tips to include in your plan.
Preventing Intrusions with Training
A fall 2020 phishing attack against the University of Missouri Health Center exposed data for more than 14,000 patients. The health center noted two employee email accounts were hacked, which led to data access to Social Security numbers, clinical information, and other patient-specific data. The breach underscores the threat of staff members as the most prevalent conduit for hackers. Preventing such instances takes diligent training that helps workers understand the various threats and how they should adjust their behaviors accordingly. This is critically important.
Hackers also attack healthcare providers to take advantage of overworked nurses, doctors, and other clinical staff. COVID-19 places enormous strain on these workers, and they may not make the best IT-related decisions when they’re functioning on limited sleep and enormous stress.
Preventing the “human element” that leads to ransomware attacks requires diligent training. Here are some key tips for employees:
Show staff members examples of phishing schemes. Use visuals to show them emails that might look authentic at first glance but deserve closer inspection. For example, phishing emails might include links with misspelled addresses and may not look professional, however recent phishing emails look very authentic, and hackers are getting much better at fooling people. Many recent hacking schemes use COVID-19 content to grab people’s interest.
Discuss some of the most prevalent tricks hackers use to fool people, such as adding an urgent tone to messages or imploring them to take an unusual action, or even something as simple as “click here”.
Encourage staff to confirm messages with their superiors or outside trusted resources. So instead of relying on a “Breakthrough Message from the CDC”, they should visit the official CDC site for assurance.
Remind staff members it’s always acceptable to alert IT about suspicious messages. Get them to err on the side of caution, while also giving them the access they need to work effectively.
Talk about vishing and smishing schemes, which come through the phone, tablet, or through SMS messaging. Email-based phishing has been around for a while, so hackers are using new pathways like vishing and smishing to persuade your employees to give them access.
Manage Remote Workers
The number of at-home healthcare workers is exploding due to COVID-19, as administrative and billing roles are easily handled through online platforms. And, with the rise in telemedicine, more practitioners are setting up HIPPA-compliant communications tools from home.
By Howard Bright, vice president of patient engagement, RevSpring.
Howard Bright
“Life keeps throwing me stones and I keep finding the diamonds.” – Ana Claudia Antunes
I appreciate that philosophy because it applies to so many situations, including the federal price transparency regulation that goes into effect on January 1, 2021. Many providers are dreading the new rule and all that complying with it will require (it’s hardly a secret that the industry has actively resisted the ruling). But a careful look can reveal “diamonds”— major competitive advantages, improved revenue collection and even increased patient loyalty—for hospitals that see and seize the opportunities.
Skeptical?
It’s understandable considering the problems that many providers have experienced with price estimation tools in the past. To be clear, the ruling does not require hospitals to provide explicit price estimates. What it does mandate is the following:
“Make standard charges public in two files displayed prominently on the Internet and updated at least annually.”
One of those files must be “machine readable” (J-SON, XML, CSV) and include all “items and services.” The other must be a “consumer-friendly shoppable services file,” that uses plain language, descriptions and codes covering 70 CMS-specified items and services and an additional 230 hospital-specified items and services.
While that might sound relatively straightforward, most hospital administrators and revenue management leaders know that the devil, frequently, hides in the details. And when viewed through the lens of the patient, those details could prove to be tremendously overwhelming. Making the mandated information easy to access and patient specific—and even providing an interactive price shopping tool that gives patients simple ways to act—is where the competitive advantage lies for savvy hospitals and hospital systems.
In other words, don’t view the ruling simply as an onerous data requirement but, rather, as a communications and patient engagement opportunity. By providing data that is clear, concise, consistent, and easy for human beings to understand, not only will you meet a true consumer need you will set your hospital apart from competitors.
Most will probably do the bare minimum by publishing their insurance negotiated rates as the mandate requires and others will risk the consequences of non-compliance. In a recent webinar I provided on this topic, 36 percent of attendees said they were “still investigating options for how to comply with the ruling” and a shocking (at least to me) 8 percent said they had “not started yet.”
By Fahad Aziz, co-founder and chief technology officer, Caremerge.
As senior care providers brace for a potential second wave of COVID-19, they must hone their plans to keep residents safe, happy, and healthy while in quarantine.
But in a community of hundreds of residents, it can be challenging to monitor each and every resident’s health and wellbeing without help from technology.
Enter electronic health record (EHR) systems and resident activity and wellness data, which give community decision makers a fuller picture of each residents’ health so that they can provide the care and activities to match.
Here’s how data can help communities act on a more holistic, individualized model of care for their seniors, throughout the pandemic and into the future.
EHRs Streamline the Continuum of Clinical Care
The pandemic has highlighted a major operational pain point on the clinical side of senior living. Reliance on manual health data creates information silos, and it’s very difficult to transfer resident health information to and from health care providers when it’s all on paper.
EHRs make communication between care providers a lot more efficient and transparent. When a resident’s clinical profile is all digital, senior living staff can easily record, update, send, and retrieve information so that they can focus on what matters: providing excellent care for residents.
By Ilia Sotnikov, vice president of product management, Netwrix.
Ilia Sotnikov
New warnings from the FBI report “an increased and imminent cybercrime threat” to U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers. Experts say the ransomware, called Ryuk, was seen by at least five U.S. hospitals in October. This isn’t unexpected.
In fact, recent research has found that every third healthcare organization experienced a ransomware attack during the past few months. This is the highest exposure across all industries surveyed, above education, finance and public sector. It has disrupted patient care at up to 510 facilities.
So with cyberattacks in healthcare at their peak, it’s time to take heed. Particularly since ransomware in the healthcare sector not only impacts money and reputation, but also human health and lives. And with the current pandemic, healthcare organizations are more vital and fragile than ever.
Today’s healthcare strongly depends on IT; without access to health data and IT systems, doctors cannot provide treatment to patients or make decisions. What is worse, if intensive care units and life-support devices, which are typically connected to the network, are blocked by ransomware, this puts lives of critically ill patients at risk. Such a damage is incomparable to losses in terms of reputation and money, but these still follow as well for healthcare organizations just as they do in other industries.
One of the common reasons why the healthcare industry is vulnerable to ransomware is the frequent use of legacy systems that can be easily exploited by hackers. Making hospitals even more vulnerable to cybercrime is that their IT departments are understaffed. This makes them prone to errors, particularly as they face additional pressure and the demand to support remote work due to pandemic.
In fact, 39% of healthcare organizations suffered from admin mistakes during the past few months. Such mistakes might include improper configurations changes or failure to install updates in a timely manner, which result in vulnerabilities.
The sad reality is that any hospital might fall a victim of ransomware. Therefore, it makes sense to get ready to the worst scenario, taking under consideration the shortage of resources that organizations in the health sector face. Here are five major areas to focus on:
Understanding the different types of medical practices is important for anyone getting into this industry, as the type that you choose to work in will have a lasting impact on your career and your life as a whole. It’s important to factor in the many characteristics and benefits of these multiple practices to learn which style suits you best.
Here is a look at some of the many different types of practices that nurses and doctors can get involved in, and their pros and cons, ranging from group practices to hospital-based employment a beyond.
Group Practice
Group practice is used to describe a medical facility that consists of two or more physicians providing medical care. Usually, these staff members will have different and complementary specializations so that the practice can provide a service to multiple types of patients. However, some group practices, such as a dental practice, will have multiple individuals who have specialized in the same field.
In a group practice, all the work and resources are shared, which includes the running and administering of the practice. If you’re interested in starting your medical practice, it’s first vital that you figure out how the income is going to be divided before you start going through the motions to set the practice up. Click here for more information on this.
It’s important to learn about the different ways that a group practice can be set up, as this will alter how it runs and operates. The most common type of group practice until very recently was association practices, however, partnership practices have risen in popularity because of their alternate funding model.
Group practices are good because they increase the financial security of all those involved, and because there’s multiple staff, it also increases your flexibility. There’s also a greater tolerance to financial risk when compared to the other types, and there is very little if not any at all startup costs when joining an existing practice.
For the first time in our lives, we have been able to see how artificial intelligence would influence a pandemic from identification and tracking to treatment and vaccination. Two things had to perfectly align to make this happen.
Technology had to advance to a place where it could analyze, predict, and engage with extreme accuracy and a virus had to be dangerous enough to spur massive funding and demand for action. We reached that tipping point in 2020. As the year comes to a close it is time to consider all that AI has done and where it is likely to continue to impact epidemiology and disaster response moving forward.
Tracking
HealthMap, an AI application run by Boston Children’s Hospital, was launched in 2006 and was one of the first tools used to detect and track the COVID-19 outbreak in China. The algorithm uses online data about infectious disease events from news outlets and social media in more than a dozen languages. It then applied machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to track outbreaks.
Diagnosis
Tracking or predicting where cases might show up is just one step in a long journey to stopping the spread of the virus. An article published in May 2020 by researchers in the U.S. and China would reveal that Artificial Intelligence was accurately diagnosing COVID-19 in 68% of patients who had previously been thought to be negative and had normal results on chest imaging. The AI algorithm used to compare imaging, symptoms, medical history, and exposure was said to have “equal sensitivity as compared to a senior thoracic radiologist.” I have also had the pleasure of reading some yet-to-be-published articles about how AI is helping in the ICU to predictively determine ventilator utilization but it’s not just ventilators.
When it came time to harness AI in the diagnosis of COVID-19, even the CDC jumped on board. In partnership with Microsoft’s Azure platform, they embedded a symptom checker chatbot on their website. Likely out of an abundance of caution, their bot uses what I term “light-AI” to guide patients through a very basic decision tree. Answering simple yes-no questions to determine their likelihood of needing a test.
As long as we continue to prioritize data, AI will have the information needed to analyze and predict, it’s a very logical application of the technology — but what about using it to engage patients and address widespread misinformation and fear?
The Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was adopted in 1996. It seeks to ensure the secure management of healthcare information and outlines guidelines that all healthcare organizations and employees must follow to manage protected healthcare information (PHI). Under HIPAA, PHI is any information that can be used to identify an individual, including:
Contact information
Demographic information
Lab test results
Insurance information
Medical history
As technology continues to evolve, the risks facing PHI also grow. It’s now more important than ever for players in the healthcare industry to comply with HIPAA to avoid costly penalties. To understand the significance ofHIPAA compliance, it’s best to revisit past cases relating to violations. These cases will provide crucial lessons on how to avoid common HIPAA-related mistakes.
Case #1: Allergy Associates of Hartford, Conn.
Hartford-based Allergy Associates was fined $125,000 after a patient complained to the Department of Health and Human Services about the disclosure of her PHI by a physician at the facility to a reporter. An investigation revealed that the physician disregarded advice from the hospital’s privacy officer not to respond to the media regarding claims that the woman had been turned away from the facility for bringing along her service animal. Following the disclosure, Allergy Associates failed to take any corrective or disciplinary action towards the physician.
Lesson Learned
Allergy Associates should have disciplined the physician besides taking corrective action to prevent similar incidents from occurring. Had it done so, the facility would probably not have been penalized. This highlights why healthcare entities should take immediate remediation action when such incidents occur and hold employees responsible for their behavior. Likewise, employees should be trained on media protocols to ensure that PHI is not intentionally or unintentionally disclosed to the media as it happened with Allergy Associates.
