An Ounce of Prevention for the Healthcare IT Network
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By Paquette, Mike  Bots and trojans and spyware, oh my! New threats arrive daily to exploit vulnerable healthcare networks. Here's how to protect yours.
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(Source: AT&T)  The federal government has awarded more than $139 million to help healthcare providers move medical records more easily within a geographic region. The hope is that Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIO) will be the building blocks of a National Health Information Network.
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Doctors try to balance a patient's trust with new technology.
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IBM and the University of Florida are working on technology that lets doctors remotely monitor patient health.
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The U.S. Congress needs to pass healthcare IT legislation before private companies develop multiple systems that don&#39;t talk to each other, two advocacy groups said Tuesday.Members of the Health IT Now Coalition and the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) urged Congress to move ahead with health IT legislation such as the Promoting Health Information Technology Act. The bill would establish a public/private group to recommend health IT standards and certification and would budget $163 million a year for health-care providers to adopt health IT products, such as electronic health records.Health technologies can help improve healthcare quality, reduce costs and encourage changes in treatment, said former U.S. Representative Nancy Johnson, co-chairwoman of the Health IT Now Coalition.Health IT is &quot;going to produce radical change,&quot; Johnson said at a news conference. &quot;It&#39;s going to radically improve the quality of health care that Americans receive.&quot;With health-care costs continuing to climb, moving to an electronic system that reduces paper and medical errors is the best hope to extend health care to U.S. residents who are uninsured, she added. &quot;It is the only way that we guarantee to Americans of every age that our health-care system will continue to deliver the state-of-the-art medicine for which it has been known worldwide,&quot; Johnson said.The Promoting Health Information Technology Act has stalled in the House of Representatives and a similar piece of legislation, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act, has stalled in the Senate.Some groups, including Patient Privacy Rights, have raised concerns that the legislation doesn&#39;t adequately address patient privacy issues. &quot;The Senate Wired Act has no privacy protections or language ensuring patient control of health records,&quot; the group said on its Web site. &quot;It must not pass unless patients have the right to keep their health records private.&quot;Privacy and security must be major components of a health IT bill, Johnson said at the news conference. But she and Rhett Dawson, ITI&#39;s president and CEO, said Congress should pass a health IT bill before vendors develop multiple systems that don&#39;t interoperate. &quot;The public interest is in interoperability,&quot; Johnson said.A health IT bill would be a major accomplishment that lawmakers could show to voters before the November elections, Dawson said. &quot;We believe the time to act is now,&quot; he added.In addition to the news conference, a group of IT vendors, including Lexmark, NetApp and NCR, demonstrated health technologies at a congressional office building on Tuesday.EMC&#39;s RSA division demonstrated secure Web sign-on technologies that patients and health-care providers can use. RSA&#39;s Secure Web Access for Patient and Provider Portals allows administrators to set access rights based on who&#39;s signing in, said Seth Geftic, RSA product marketing manger. For example, a doctor could have access to more patient records than a nurse or an insurance provider, he said.In addition, RSA provides authentication technologies that can be used to recognize users when they first sign in. For example, the RSA Adaptive Authentication can use publicly available information, such as height, car loans and old addresses, to authenticate a user entering a health IT Web site for the first time, Geftic said.&quot;You don&#39;t even have to enter the last four digits of your Social Security number,&quot; added Shannon Kellogg, director of information security policy in EMC&#39;s office of government relations.
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This organization fell victim to what can be described as the Achilles' heel of storage infrastructure - the intersection of technology bugs and human error. This is a highly unpredictable type of risk, and unfortunately the opportunities for prevention and avoidance are few.
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While corporations are monitoring ports and using advanced security tools to fend off infection and attack, home users -- who have less technical sophistication -- are left more susceptible, sometimes
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Health industry, tech firms, government agencies might collaborate to build a secure database of patient records.
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This article provides an overview of ITIL, a management-level set of best practices and guidelines for an integrated and process-based approach to IT and security.
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Despite the perception that technology is the panacea that will improve patient safety and reduce medication errors, nearly 20 percent of hospital and health system medication errors reported to USP&#39;s MEDMARXSM program in 2003 involved computerization or
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(Source: Lumension Security)  Today's IT security model is broken. In the ongoing battle to defend against malicious attacks, the industry studies and surveys continue to reveal a sobering fact: Although more than 99 percent of companies have anti-virus technology deployed, about 60 percent still suffer from malware infection every year. More organizations every year are also falling victim to data theft, despite the additional layers of IT security. Using traditional security measures, organizations must continuously react to risks, forcing them to constantly play catch-up with today's relentless barrage of viruses, spyware, Trojans and rogue devices. IT security has reached a tipping point, as reactive security solutions are simply unable to keep up with this constant tirade of malicious attacks. Join IDC Analyst Charles Kolodgy as he evaluates the "positive security model" as an emerging alternative and define its elements, including how this model lays a policy-based framework that facilitates proactive, continuous security across the enterprise.  In addition to Mr. Kolodgy's presentation, attendees will hear about: -How the Positive Security Model simplifes the entire security management lifecycle-Lumension Security's solutions, which provide you with unified protection and control of all endpoints-First hand experience from CWIE Holdings about the drawbacks of relying on traditional security measures
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Having easy access to a doctor's e-mail address appears to increase patient communication.
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At Computerworld&#8217;s Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference, attendees said IT departments should look for ways to give their companies a business edge -- even at the risk of suffering some technology failures.
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Before me lies the patient, a Gateway computer running Windows 98. It is suffering from extremely clogged Internet arteries, unable to reach the Web. As one of The Washington Post's digital doctors, my task is to nurse the machine back to health so my colleague Kathleen Day can access her e-mail and file stories from home.
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Health industry, tech firms, government agencies might collaborate to \
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Nowhere is wireless network reliability, coverage and speed more important than in healthcare applications.  Columnist Craig Mathias says new-generation WLAN systems are up to the task.
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IT managers who fret about employees using unauthorized software at work will have another tool to worry about, especially in industries where information management is heavily regulated, like health care and finance.