Zingbox, provider of healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) analytics platform, announced new research demonstrating that hackers are leveraging error messages from connected medical devices — including radiology, X-ray and other imaging systems — to gain valuable insights. These insights are then used to refine the attacks, increasing the chance of successful hack.
“Hackers are finding new and creative ways to target connected medical devices. We have to be in front of these trends and vulnerabilities before they can cause real harm,” said Xu Zou, Zingbox CEO and co-founder. “We make it our mission to assist and collaborate with device manufacturers to ensure the security and uninterrupted service of connected medical devices.”
Information gathering phase of a typical cyberattack is very time intensive phase where hackers learn as much as they can about the target network and devices. By simply monitoring the network traffic for common error messages, hackers can gain valuable insight into the inner workings of a device’s application; the type of web server, framework and versions used; the manufacturer that developed it; the database engine in the back end; the protocols used; and even the line of code that is causing the error. Hackers can also target specific devices to induce error messages. With this information, the information gathering phase is greatly shortened and they can quickly customize their attack to be tailored to the target device.
Zingbox’s research discovered that:
Information shared as part of common error messages can be leveraged by hackers to compromise target connected devices.
Hackers can “trick” or induce medical devices into sharing detailed information about the device’s inner workings.
Leveraging this information quickens a hacker’s access to a hospital’s network.
“Imagine how much more effective hackers can be if they find out that a device is running on IIS Web Server, using Oracle as backend and even gathering usernames,” said Daniel Regalado, principal security researcher at Zingbox and co-author of Gray Hat Hacking. “That will help them to focus their attack vectors towards the database where PHI data might be stored.”
The research also revealed that the healthcare industry has made great strides in collaborating across providers, vendors and manufacturers: there was rapid response and a willingness to generate patches for their medical devices from three out of seven manufacturers whose devices were included in the study. However, there is still work to be done to bring the urgency of these findings as well as increased collaboration between security vendors and device manufacturers.
By Inga Shugalo, healthcare industry analyst, Itransition.
Inga Shugalo
Following the wind of change, we find that healthcare is on the way to transferring most of its processes to the cloud. According to IDC, hospitals now tend to prefer keeping custom medical software from EHRs to AI and data analytics on cloud servers instead of in-house management.
With more providers investing in scalability and cost-efficiency of cloud solutions, the recent research forecasts the global healthcare cloud computing market to reach $35 billion by 2022 at 11.6 percent CAGR.
Currently, the cloudification develops in two complementary directions.
Some providers only test the waters going for a new cloud solution, for example, a mobile app to support chronic disease management. Others consider migrating their already existing architecture elements to the cloud to enable seamless synchronization between different system parts, create new team collaboration practices, or save time and money on the infrastructure maintenance.
Since cloud migration is a complex process requiring substantial planning and good timing, we’ve decided to cover the initial steps of a smooth transition to the cloud.
Assessing the infrastructure
First things first, there is a good chance you don’t need to migrate the full infrastructure and can better manage your investments by injecting them into strategic areas only. Start with considering your as-is situation and pinpointing the architecture components with the potential to impact the business evolution via new or improved services.
Additionally, take into account the possible technology and business constraints, upcoming updates, integration and compatibility requirements for the solutions, as well as the need for a substantial redesign before starting the cloud migration.
It can turn out that some big data archives that aren’t used frequently can stay on-premise, and some applications will serve providers better from the cloud due to increased robustness and security for the regular multi-user access.
In this case, an organization can choose to go for the hybrid environment, decreasing the load on in-house servers and adding up more flexibility to the picked system elements.
Self-check: What are our migration goals?
Answering this question, you will be able to determine the priority elements for migration to the cloud by determining the most pressing needs, such as everyday workflows, equipment management, or disaster recovery.
While thinking about the goals, review all parts of the infrastructure, including business and clinical applications, such as EHR, LIS, PACS, and RIS, assigning them to one of the following categories:
First to be migrated
Future migration projects
Unable/unneeded to migrate
With such a clear prioritization, it will be easier to assemble a migration roadmap that will guide the project scope creation, design, and implementation processes.
Drafting a migration strategy
After your priorities are all set, it is time to create a migration strategy based on applications and data to be transferred to the cloud. You can either pick one of the approaches or mix and match them depending on particular infrastructure elements.
The American Medical Association (AMA) announced the release of the 2019 Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code set. There are 335 code changes in the new CPT edition reflecting the CPT Editorial Panel and the healthcare community’s combined annual effort to capture and describe the latest scientific and technological advances in medical, surgical and diagnostic services.
“The CPT code set is the foundation upon which every element of the medical community – doctors, hospitals, allied health professionals, laboratories and payers – can efficiently share accurate information about medical services,” said AMA president Barbara L. McAneny, M.D. “The latest annual changes to the CPT code set reflect new technological and scientific advancements available to mainstream clinical practice, and ensure the code set can fulfill its trusted role as the health system’s common language for reporting contemporary medical procedures. That’s why we believe CPT serves both as the language of medicine today and the code to its future.”
Among this year’s important changes to CPT are code additions that reflect the tremendous potential of using connected health tools to better support clinicians in patient population health and care coordination services, and other novel delivery systems that are vital for improving the overall quality of health care.
These include three new remote patient monitoring codes that reflect how health care professionals can more effectively and efficiently use technology to connect with their patients at home and gather data for care management and coordination. Also, two new interprofessional internet consultation codes have been added to reflect the increasing importance of using non-verbal communication technology to coordinate patient care between a consulting physician and a treating physician.
“The AMA has urged the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service to adopt the new codes for remote patient monitoring and internet consulting and designate the related services for payment under federal health programs in 2019,” said Dr. McAneny. “Medicare’s acceptance of the new codes would signal a landmark shift to better support physicians participating in patient population health and care coordination services that can be a significant part of a digital solution for improving the overall quality of medical care.”
Additional CPT changes for 2019 include new and revised codes for skin biopsy, fine needle aspiration biopsy, adaptive behavior analysis, and central nervous system assessments including psychological and neuropsychological testing. Broad input from practicing physicians, medical specialty societies and the greater health care community was considered by the CPT Editorial Panel to produce the latest practical enhancements to CPT that reflect the coding demands of the modern healthcare system.
After more than two days of thought leadership discussions during its 30th Anniversary Annual Forum, executive participants of the HealthCare Executive Group (HCEG) voted on and ranked the 2019 HCEG Top 10 critical challenges, issues and opportunities they expect to face in their organizations in the coming year.
Executives from payer, provider and technology partner organizations were presented with a list of more than 25 topics selected by the HCEG Board of Directors and other thought leaders. The list was augmented by the 2018 Industry Pulse Survey. Roundtable discussions hosted during the Forum amongst the more than 100 attendees and invited industry experts allowed the topics to be explored and expounded upon, prior to a digital ranking that culminated in the 2019 HCEG Top 10.
2019 HCEG Top 10 Challenges, Issues and Opportunities
Data and Analytics:? Leveraging data (especially clinical) to manage health and drive individual, provider and payer decisions.
Total Consumer Health:? Improving members’ overall medical, social, financial, and environmental well-being.
Population Health Services: O?perationalizing community-based health strategy, chronic care management, driving clinical integration, and addressing barriers to health such as social determinants.
Value-based Payments: T?ransitioning to and targeting specific medical conditions to manage cost and improve quality of care.
The Digital Healthcare Organization:? HSAs, portals, patient literacy, cost transparency, digital payments, CRM, wearables and other patient-generated data, health monitoring, and omni-channel access/distribution.
Rising Pharmacy Costs:? Implementing strategies to address growth of pharma costs along with benefits to quality of care and total healthcare costs.
External Market Disruption:? New players like Amazon, Chase, Apple, Walmart, and Google.
Operational Effectiveness:? Implementing lean quality programs, process efficiency (with new core business models), robotics automation, revenue cycle management, real-time/near-time point of sales transactions, etc.
Opioid Management:? Developing strategies for identifying and supporting individuals and populations struggling with substance abuse/addiction or at risk of addiction.
Cybersecurity:? Protecting the privacy and security of consumer information to maintain consumer trust in sharing data.
“Selecting and ranking healthcare issues is always a challenge as we are in a very critical and dynamic stage in healthcare,” said Ferris W. Taylor, executive director of HCEG. “?Everything seems important. Particularly, issue #11 — healthcare policy reform — and issue #12 — precision/personalized medicine?. More than a handful of HCEG members were surprised that these topics did not make the Top 10. HCEG plans to further explore the reasoning through facilitated discussions at upcoming events and within the HCEG digital community. It’s a compliment to the HCEG members that we reached an agreement on these 10 critical and actionable issues.”
Binary Fountain released the findings of its second annual “Healthcare Consumer Insight and Digital Engagement” survey with the goal of getting an updated view into how patients search, evaluate and share their experiences with their physicians. The survey shows an increase in patients’ dependence and reliance on online ratings and review sites to make informed healthcare decisions.
Americans Are More Comfortable Sharing their Healthcare Experiences Online
Today, social media platforms are being used to discuss and share all elements of a person’s life, which now includes healthcare experiences. The survey results showed that consumers have become increasingly comfortable with sharing their personal healthcare experiences online. In particular, millennial consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 are the most active over social media and are the most inclined to share their healthcare experiences online.
According to the survey, 51 percent of Americans say they share their personal healthcare experiences via social media, online ratings and review sites, a 65 percent increase from the 2017 survey results. Specifically, 70 percent of millennials have shared their physician or hospital experiences online, and 68 percent of “young millennials” between the ages of 18 to 24 said they have shared their healthcare experience online — a 94 percent increase from last year.
The survey finds that Facebook is the most used channel to share healthcare experiences for ages 25 to 54. However, unlike last year, consumers between the ages of 18 to 24 say Google is their preferred online platform to share their healthcare experiences. In 2017, survey respondents between the ages of 18 to 24 selected Twitter as their most used channel to share healthcare experiences.
Growing Dependence on Online Ratings and Review Sites
The survey shows that healthcare consumers continue to depend on online ratings and review sites. More and more, consumers are seeking online healthcare advice and relying on unfiltered, transparent patient feedback to determine whether a healthcare practitioner or practice is worth a visit. The below survey results reflect the true impact that online ratings and review sites have on consumers, as well as, the continued rise in healthcare consumerism.
Ninety-five percent of respondents find online ratings and reviews “somewhat” to “very” reliable with 100 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 24 find online ratings and reviews “somewhat” to “very” reliable and 97 percent of respondents between the ages of 25 to 34 do as well.
Likewise, 70 percent of Americans say online ratings and review sites have influenced their decision when selecting a physician, and even when referred by another doctor, 41 percent of consumers still check online ratings and reviews of doctors and specialists.
Of the respondents that utilized websites/platforms to choose a physician, 34 percent selected hospital and/or clinic’s website as a primary source, followed by Google (29 percent), WebMD (18 percent), Healthgrades (15 percent) and Facebook (12 percent).
Expectations Remain High for Patient Care
Patients today have high expectations for customer service and bedside manner. The survey examined, through multiple-answer questions, what factors matter most to patients when rating or evaluating a physician. The survey results revealed:
Consistent with the 2017 survey results, 48 percent of Americans across all age groups selected “a friendly and caring attitude” as the most important factor.
Whereas, 47 percent of consumers selected “ability to answer all my questions” followed by 45 percent of consumers who selected “thoroughness of the examination” as the most important factors.
Overall, 52 percent of women believe “a friendly and caring attitude” is the most important factor, while 45 percent of men believe “ability to answer all your questions” is the most important factor.
Somatix is a leader in wearable-assisted gesture detection for real-time health intervention and well being enhancement.
Elevator pitch Somatix is a leader in wearable-assisted gesture detection for real-time health intervention and well being enhancement. Somatix derives physical and emotional symptoms from simple hand gestures, utilizing sensors built into a range of wearables to remotely detect, analyze, gain insights and act on massive volumes of body motion data. The platform additionally employs machine learning and advanced analytics capabilities to apply personalized CBT (cognitive behavior therapy)-driven intervention that increase individuals’ treatment adherence and improve people’s lives.
Eran Ofir
Founders’ story|
Eran Ofir is the CEO and co-founder of Somatix, a real-time gesture detection platform for effective healthcare intervention, utilizing sensors built into a range of wearables to remotely detect, analyze, gain insights and act on massive volumes of body motion data. Eran has 20 years of experience in executive roles with multinational companies, where he established and led business units at Orange, AOL Mobile, Amdocs, Convergys and NCR. Over the last decade, Eran has lived and worked in Israel, South Africa, China and the US, selling software platforms, hardware, services and consulting to customers in telecom, internet, retail, utilities, financial services and healthcare sectors. Eran is a Tel-Aviv University graduate in electrical engineering (BSc) and finance-marketing MBA.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Somatix targets organizations with clear financial interest in maintaining high employee, customer and patient health levels, driven by the requirement for technological innovations capable of enhancing preventative healthcare and rehabilitative treatment.
Our G2M strategy aims to directly sell to clinics and hospitals bearing the impact of changes in payment arrangements for the services they render, health insurance companies whose profitability is constantly being eroded by mounting healthcare expense reimbursements and senior corporate human resources managers offering employee benefit programs.
Market opportunity
Smoking-related illness in the United States costs more than $300 billion annually, nearly $170 billion in direct medical care for adults and $156 billion in lost productivity. The global smoking cessation and nicotine de-addiction market is expected to reach $21.8B by 2024.
The population addicted to smoking is rapidly increasing. The growing desire to quit smoking and health complications associated with smoking serve as incentives for companies to introduce novel solutions and drive the growth of the smoking cessation and nicotine de-addiction market.
Who are your competitors?
We identify two types of competitors: big-data analytics and solution specific companies; most are smoking cessation consumer mobile apps. None of the other existing smoking cessation solutions in the market today offers the four key benefits we do (see competitive advantages below), and in fact most don’t even offer a combination of two.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates Somatix?
SmokeBeat is superior to other smoking cessation solutions, mainly because it:
Automatically detects smoking gestures.
Enables clinicians to passively monitor, follow up on and enhance smoker adherence with prescribed cessation treatments.
Provides complete, ongoing awareness of treatment success vs. predefined goals; delivers information-rich statistics on smoking routines, including number of cigarettes consumed, smoking time of day and location, long-term impact on health, financial costs and more.
Employs machine learning and analytics to generate personalized CBT-based interventions.
There are many uses of information technology in healthcare. In the previous years, these implementations have developed more than anyone could anticipate. They boost efficiency, improve the quality of care and security and control costs. These advancements have created many benefits for the patients and medical facilities in both the public and the private sector. When asked, experts say that these are some of the biggest health IT issues that should be considered:
Interoperability
Interoperability, when it comes to healthcare is one of the processes that make it easier for medical services to share information on patients. It makes the healthcare more efficient — it prevents doing the same tests multiple times on one patient and it helps specialists communicate quickly through the system.
This is why it’s so crucial that this technology continues advancing and moving further while making the job of doctors all over the world as simple and as focused on the problem as possible.
Security
Of course, with so much data which exists in healthcare field, security of that data is one of the top priorities. In recent years we have come across so many examples of how not to handle patient data but now that we are dealing with population Healthcare, we need to be even more careful. That’s why cyber security of the data became an imperative at so many companies.
“Security is something that you should definitely keep an eye on. Whenever you see that there is a new update, make sure that your healthcare organization has it. People are getting more and more skilled at hacking and obtaining data that this has to be a priority,” said Gina Petrelli, a data analyst from OriginWritings and WriteMyX
Big Data
Because there is such a shortage of trained medical personnel in the world, big data will have to become the main source for point-of-care information. This can improve the current state of health in certain groups as well as establish customization so that every technology can be unique to each culture. It will also help develop safer and more efficient systems across the world.
Big data means that there are many sources and a lot of data to be taken from them — medical professionals will have the kind of information that they usually can’t easily get.
Investments
Over the years, there have been some big investments made towards the healthcare technology industry. However, those investments are noticeable now more than ever — technologies are advancing fast and this progress is visible in many areas.
Investments in healthcare information technology has mostly been aimed at technologies that improve efficiency, technology that supports decision making and personalized medicine, technology that empowers patients, technology that protects against cyber attacks and technology that enables remote health monitoring.
Why most investments are made towards these areas is understandable — they contribute to the overall health and safety of populations.
Improvements of EHR
Electronic health records are something that is already in place and has been for some time now. While there are many benefits to this, it can sometimes be a nuisance and a burden to medical professionals. They are often not inter-operable and that causes a lot headaches to doctors across the world. Any technology that allows for easier use and interoperability is going to be well-accepted.
“While we’ve had these technologies for years now, you’ll have to notice that they caused many troubles – security, operating, transitioning from paper to digital. New improvements could change that,” said Dennis Marks, a communication manager at 1Day2Write.
Telemedicine
Growth of telemedicine has been steady over the years but the growth will speed up in the future years. This will enable doctors to examine patients using wearables and use that data to assist them in diagnostics, management and prevention later. This is all thanks to MACRA, value-based demands placed upon the providers and so on.
Despite the best efforts of the government, there are still millions of US citizens who don’t have healthcare coverage. This translates into a large percentage of the population forced to forego preventative care and even emergency healthcare services. While bureaucrats continue to rewrite laws and introduce legislation that might make health care more affordable, more practical solutions are also being sought. There are mobile health clinics appearing in major cities, as well as well-known walk in medical clinic businesses that are emerging in both rural and rural environments. In order for people without health insurance to get access to medical services, they have to know what is available to them.
Healthcare Coverage Based On Income
Both older Americans, as well as low-income citizens, can get medical insurance if they ask for assistance. Medicare and Medicaid are government subsidized healthcare plans that can be used in traditional doctors’ offices as well as hospital emergency rooms. People with disabilities and even people who are experiencing hard times can usually qualify for coverage for themselves and their families. These kinds of medical plans are widely known in the US and are accepted by most doctors. The only downside is that neither of these government-sponsored medical plans is all-inclusive. More specifically, Medicare does not offer dental coverage.
Charity-based Healthcare Services
If a medical emergency occurs and the person affected doesn’t have any kind of medical coverage, then he or she can expect a very large bill to follow soon after. Financial limitations can be a major obstacle for people suffering from chronic medical issues for several reasons. First, if you have amassed a big medical bill from a local hospital and you haven’t at least set up a repayment plan, you can be prevented from scheduling any future procedures. Second, having a large medical debt appear on your credit report can make it hard for those without health care coverage to get better-paying jobs or otherwise get out of this vicious cycle. Charities offer help with medical bills as well as give a segment of the population access to low-cost healthcare services.
Somatix