News
In application programming interface deals with Health Gorilla, Inuvio, Medisafe and Wink Health, drchrono enables users to tap new functionalities with its EHR, revenue cycle and practice management platform.
Price transparency tools can help patients make more educated purchasing decisions. But they must include information on both cost and quality to be effective.
Employment grew in ambulatory services by 27,000 jobs in the last month.
The research also found that womens’ salaries grew at a higher rate than their male counterparts, while orthopedists, cardiologists, dermatologists are the highest-paid doctors.
The Samsam and Maktub Locker malicious code programs attack vulnerable patches and spread to all systems connected to a network.
The steady drumbeat of ransomware attacks continued this past week with new reports of two hospitals forced to fight off malware that froze IT systems.
San Diego-based Alvarado Hospital Medical Center was hit by a "malware disruption" on March 31, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. A spokesperson for the 306-bed hospital confirmed the cyber attack, but would not say which systems had been affected.
Alvarado was the third hospital owned by Prime Healthcare Services to be hit with malware in March; Chino Valley Medical Center and Desert Valley Hospital had also been affected by viruses but were able to recover systems with minimal disruption and without having to pay ransom.
[Also: Looking to improve cybersecurity? Fire some CEOs]
For its part, Alvarado said it had taken "extraordinary steps to protect and expeditiously find a resolution to this disruption," according to a statement provided to the Union-Tribune, but offered little other detail except to say patient and employee records had not been compromised.
"The hospital remains fully operational, and no patients have been turned away. All significant clinical systems needed for operations are fully functional," said hospital spokesperson Laura Gilbert. "Our IT team took great efforts to protect and restore our systems and a ransom was never paid."
Meanwhile, another hospital, this one in southeast Indiana, said it proactively powered down all its computer systems on Wednesday, after discovering that a single employee's file had been infected with Locky ransomware virus.
King's Daughters' Health officials told Indiana's WSCH radio that patient data was secure and had not been compromised, and that it would restart its computer systems once it is safe to do so. In the meantime, KDH is using manual processes to continue operations.
Linda Darnell, the hospital's senior director of IT, told the station that ongoing staff education about these evolving cyber threats had helped employees act quickly to contain the Locky virus once it was found.
Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn
Cybercriminals said they'll unlock the data for 45 Bitcoins, and they gave the hospital an option of paying 3 Bitcoins to unlock a single computer.
The United States Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Center issued a joint cyber alert on March 31, in response to the recent surge in ransomware attacks on hospitals and other organizations.
The company suspended testing, hired three board certified pathologist to run its lab, and publicly vowed to work with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to resolve the issues.
Clinical decision support misfires are commonplace but often hard to detect, according to a close examination of CDS systems at Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston published in the most recent Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.