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There are so many new medical devices today flooding the market, offering hope for a brighter tomorrow. But what good are they if they cannot be integrated into electronic health records or continuity of care efforts? “Integrated medical devices can contribute to efficient workflows and improved patient safety, but only if done with the strong collaboration between the technologists and the nursing end-users,” said Linda Burnes Bolton, chief nursing officer at Cedars-Sinai Health System. [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] Bolton will share Cedars-Sinai experience in a HIMSS16 session, The Next Frontier of Biomedical Device Integration, along with Jennifer Jackson, who directs clinical engineering and device integration at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. This session will describe how to successfully achieve device integration, as well as best practices for optimizing workflow, data entry and clinical documentation. The big potential is “integrated technology used to improve patient safety and documentation without compromising nursing workflow,” Bolton added. [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] Despite significant advances in medical technologies, there is a consensus that a lack of corresponding improvements in the quality of healthcare delivery in the US is inhibiting progress. “High value medical device integration programs consist of strong executive leadership, a clear vision, and the commitment to quality and innovation from several stakeholders,” Jackson said. To that end, Jackson and Bolton also plan to address: unique staff structures needed to succeed, how traditional patient monitoring can be integrated to boost collaboration, and ways to tie a medical device integration program into published recommendations. “The Next Frontier of Biomedical Device Integration,” is scheduled for Monday, Feb. 29, 2016 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Sands Expo Convention Center in Marcello 4404. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

The proliferation of patient portals offered by provider organizations has created significant usability challenges for patients while providers are feeling pressure to integrate portals to improve service quality, enhance workflow and provide a more unifying experience to patients. “The rising interest in and demand for patient-facing tools, especially patient portals, has attracted to the market a number of different vendor approaches and consumer-focused patient health record offerings designed to meet various situation-specific provider and patient needs,” said Santosh Mohan, a management fellow in IT transformation in the office of the CIO at Stanford Health Care who previously served as a senior consultant at The Advisory Board Company. Mohan stresses his opinions are his own and do not reflect those of Stanford Health Care. “Interoperability challenges and the lack of a centrally envisioned strategy for making these tools available to patients are resulting in a landscape where health information is increasingly available online, but spread broadly across the portals of various care settings and organizations that own the data.” [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] As a result, patients increasingly are being challenged to interact with multiple portals, often making it more difficult for them to be effective participants in their own care, and providers are facing the need to integrate portals to improve service quality, enhance workflow and provide a more unifying experience to patients in order to compete for consumers, Mohan explained. “Curbing ‘portal sprawl’ and rethinking patient engagement techniques to bring them up to par with consumer online experiences from other industries is no easy feat – it requires providers to cautiously navigate a complex vendor landscape and carefully evaluate ways to streamline patient experience, all without compromising functionality, usage and existing levels of patient acceptance,” he added. Mohan will deliver a presentation titled “Too Many Patient Portals – What Can You Do About It” on Tuesday, March 1, 2016, at HIMSS16. The session will be in the Sands Expo Convention Center in Galileo 1004. “My session’s objective is to surface some emerging approaches that provider organizations are pursuing to integrate patient portals across various care settings within their enterprises, and to weigh the pros and cons of these approaches,” Mohan said. “This is a roundtable session, so I will get participants to share their challenges and goals with respect to their portal-related efforts and to surface some best practices. The goal is to discuss how we can make portals accessible in a meaningful way and be effective at the same time.” Mohan suggested one big takeaway from the session will be attendees gaining a better understanding that organizations should plan portal strategies for the long-term but remain flexible in the near-term. “The immediate value of offering a quick, integrated view of a patient’s health profile must be balanced with the ultimate goal of morphing a portal into an advanced and engaging tool for the patient,” Mohan said. “Ultimately, a portal should act like a health-GPS, providing patients with situation-relevant content, navigating them back to health, and helping them stay on course. The challenge for provider organizations is how to bring this vision to life.” Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Cancer treatment is changing for the better and the application of precision medicine deserves some of the credit. Lincoln Nadauld, MD, director of Cancer Genomics at Intermountain Healthcare in Utah, said healthcare is facing a “tremendous paradigm shift. The clinical implementation of precision cancer medicine is rapidly changing the way that advanced cancer patients are treated, and improving outcomes in many cases.” Intermountain Precision Genomics, a service of Intermountain Healthcare, offers genetic sequencing of solid tumors with in-depth sequencing that identifies individual mutations within a person’s cancer cells and identifies specific DNA targets for personalized drugs. Using genomics, Intermountain has been able to identify different treatment options for nearly 80 percent of its cancer patients, Nadauld said. Intermountain offers the genomic testing to any provider nationwide, or worldwide. [Also: 11 essential quotes from notable HIMSS keynotes] The precision cancer medication — in pill form — offered by Intermountain does not have the same negative side effects that cancer treatments in the past have had, Nadauld added, and patients can take the medication in the comfort of their own homes.   Nadauld will share insights during a HIMSS16 session “Precision Medicine: The future is Here.” All of this progress does not come without some challenges, though, some of which include IT infrastructure demands, electronic health record integration and data storage considerations, Nadauld said. “While the improved treatment options associated with precision medicine approaches are exciting, the impact on information technologies is substantial and will require ongoing attention,” Nadauld said.   Despite the challenges, Nadauld said he is excited about the progress of precision medicine, especially for cancer patients.  “The past five years have seen an increasing focus and attention on precision medicine in scientific publications, popular press, and even State of the Union addresses,” he added. “While much of the conversation has centered on the promise of precision medicine, there have been few examples of actual clinical application of precision medicine principles.” “Precision Medicine: The future is Here,” is scheduled for Feb. 29, 2016 from 2-3 p.m. PST in the Sands Expo Convention Center Delfino 4004. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Leading health IT vendors get in precision medicine game at White House Summit, including Allscripts, athenahealth, McKesson.

Can healthcare providers succeed in population health management without buy-in for patients? Not likely, no. There are, however, ways of engaging those patient populations where a little information can go a long way. Take ARcare, for instance, a private nonprofit corporation serving primary care and dental needs in rural Arkansas. Just don’t let the geography fool you. ARcare is a Blue Button participant and a HIMSS Davies Award winner. Among the IT-savvy population health initiatives, ARcare increased clinicians’ ability to treat patients with diabetes. And it did so with common and relatively inexpensive technology: SMS texting. [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] “We use population health management to improve diabetes and hypertension education with interactive SMS with our patients,” ARcare CIO Greg Wolverton said, adding that ARcare uses the HIMSS Patient Engagement Framework. Wolverton will discuss ARcare’s challenges and successes in a HIMSS16 session titled “Consumer-Driven Care and the Push Toward Population Health,” on Thursday. Culled from lessons learned along the way, Wolverton recommends that healthcare organizations moving toward population health management not only recognize the role of messaging tools working in conjunction with electronic health records to coordinate care across various facilities, but also identify agile and scalable efficiencies those technologies can enable. What’s more, laying the technological foundation for consumer-driven care can give healthcare organizations data to better understand how these approaches impact patients and population alike and, from there, optimize care plans for individuals. Finally, there’s the financial upside. “Population health when properly managed can improve patients’ health,” Wolverton said, “and increase operational revenue for providers.” Wolverton’s session “Consumer-Driven Care and the Push Toward Population Health,” is slated to take place Thursday March 3, 2016 from 11:30-12:30 PST in the Sands Expo Convention Center Palazzo E. Twitter: @SullyHIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Medical image exchange platform vendor lifeIMAGE has inked a 10-year deal with clinical image viewer maker Client Outlook to make Client Outlook’s visualization platform a core component of the lifeIMAGE offering. Client Outlook’s FDA Class II diagnostic and clinical imaging viewing solution eUnity will become the default viewer across all apps and services on the lifeIMAGE enterprise image exchange platform, which links to providers and patients. [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] Client Outlook will be at lifeIMAGE booth 968 at HIMSS16 demonstrating eUnity on lifeIMAGE workstations. The lifeIMAGE technology is a hybrid local network sharing system with a cloud component to share studies outside of a provider network. Client Outlook is a universal viewer for video and still imaging in cardiology, radiology, oncology, pediatrics, emergency medicine, burn care, dermatology and other fields. “We wanted our customers to have assured availability to viewing technology of today backed by an organization sharing the same commitment we’ve shown to future innovation and interoperability,” said Matthew A. Michela, CEO and president of lifeIMAGE. Client Outlook and lifeIMAGE will collaborate to ensure the interoperability of image data across their services. Client Outlook will introduce a workflow that enables the fast transmission of studies and clinical information displayed on its viewer through the lifeIMAGE network, and lifeIMAGE is now the only major image exchange provider offering enterprise access to the eUnity universal viewer. “In partnership with lifeIMAGE we see the clear opportunity to significantly improve image data interoperability while improving physician workflow and clinical outcomes,” said Steve Rankin, president and CEO of Client Outlook. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

It seems simple enough: If a piece of medical equipment is storing, receiving, transmitting, or processing electronic protected health information, it falls within the category of devices that are covered under HIPAA. Yet, “for many practitioners, it just hasn’t occurred to them that medical devices are computers or are interfaced with computers,” said Steve Spearman, vice president of HIPAA Compliance Services of Healthicity, an information security consulting and services firm focused exclusively on healthcare. In turn, they fail to include the security of medical devices in their risk analysis processes. And that, Spearman warned, can be a dangerous and costly mistake. “In addition to the standard problems with computer vulnerabilities, compromised security in medical devices are particularly prone to issues that can affect patient care, even patient safety,” he said. [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] As recently as November 2015, Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Massachusetts agreed to pay $850,000 and implement a corrective action plan after settling with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights over a stolen laptop that was used to operate a portable CT scanner. The nonprofit teaching hospital was cited for failing to conduct an accurate and thorough risk analysis, failing to implement appropriate physical security measures, failure to assign a unique user name to identify and track users and, lastly, for disclosing the ePHI of 599 individuals whose data was stored on the laptop, Spearman said. “Medical devices pose risks similar to all other computers,” he said. “Vulnerabilities in medical devices can be exploited to gain inappropriate access to network resources.” Spearman, along with Mary McGuirl, Director of IT at Oneida Healthcare in New York, will present the session, “Assessing the Risk of Your Medical Devices,” at HIMSS16. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] With Spearman as a “nuts-and-bolts kind of guy” and McGuirl providing perspective on practical issues such as resource constraints and organizational challenges related to meeting federal requirements at a small regional hospital, the pair hopes participants come away better equipped to include medical devices in their annual risk assessment. Left out of risk analyses, medical devices “can be a vector for malware,” Spearman said, noting that many run on software or firmware, and are therefore not easily updated to more secure versions. He pointed to “inappropriate access controls,” such as weak or non-existent credentials, as a common issue that can be exploited “to undermine the integrity of the medical record.” “Even worse,” he continued, “sometimes these credentials are hard-coded and they can’t be changed! If there are no ‘unique users’ how can you conduct audits, research complaints, respond appropriately to incidents? You can’t.” The session “Assessing the Risk of Your Medical Device,” will take place from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 3, in Palazzo L. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Aiming to help HIPAA covered entities strengthen their cybersecurity preparedness, HHS Office for Civil Rights has published a crosswalk identifying mappings between NIST's Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity and the HIPAA Security Rule.  Developed in partnership with NIST and ONC, the crosswalk also includes mappings to other commonly used security frameworks, officials said. In February 2014, NIST released the framework to help organizations better understand and manage cybersecurity risks. Many organizations in healthcare and other industries voluntarily rely on detailed security guidance and specific standards issued by NIST. [Also: HIMSS presses NIST to keep cybersecurity framework voluntary] Entities bound by HIPAA, meanwhile, are required to implement strong data security safeguards to comply with the HIPAA Security Rule and protect the health data they create, receive, maintain or transmit. "We hear frequently from covered entities and business associates who said they are working hard in an increasingly challenging atmosphere to assure their PHI is adequately protected," OCR officials said. "We also know from our HIPAA enforcement work that far too frequently entities are leaving PHI vulnerable to breach and access by unauthorized persons." The goal with this new crosswalk is to help health organizations that have aligned their security programs to either the NIST Cybersecurity Framework or the HIPAA Security Rule to identify potential gaps in their programs, they said. [Also: Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act sails through Senate] By addressing those gaps, covered entities can improve their compliance with the Security Rule and better protect patient data. OCR noted that the HIPAA is meant to be flexible, scalable and technology-neutral, enabling it to better integrate with frameworks such as the NIST's. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] The Security Rule doesn't mandate use of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, officials said – and at the same time, use of the framework doesn't guarantee HIPAA compliance. But the crosswalk is meant as a tool to help health organizations manage security risks in a more comprehensive way. Noting that both the HITECH Act of 2009 and the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passed this past October called for guidance on implementation of NIST frameworks, OCR officials said the crosswalk "provides a helpful roadmap for HIPAA covered entities and their business associates to understand the overlap between the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, the HIPAA Security Rule, and other security frameworks that can help entities safeguard health data in a time of increasing risks." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN

3M Health Information Systems plans to unveil the latest module in its 360 Encompass Health Analytics Suite early next week at HIMSS16 in Las Vegas. Physician Compare integrates with the company’s Potentially Preventable Readmissions and Potentially Preventable Complications grouping software, according to materials Healthcare IT News obtained ahead of the launch. Taken together, the risk analysis methodologies enable hospitals to audit doctors to identify avoidable events, notably admissions, emergency room visits, hospital-acquired complications and preventable readmissions. [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] Physician compare brings reports for gauging physicians’ efficiency and performance compared to peers, measuring which resources they use and how those impact outcomes – as well as enabling users to identify tactics for improving physician performance. Another pre-packaged report focuses on what the company called “patient acuity” through avoidable care, admissions and healthcare costs. Released in the summer of 2015, the 3M Encompass Health Analytics Suite also includes State Compare and Patient Compare modules for benchmarking hospital quality performance and patients’ perspective on costs, performance and length of stay. The former is why University Health System in San Antonio, Texas reached out to 3M. Well, that and a little philosophy called the Triple Aim, said Camerino Salazar, senior director of health analytics at UHS. [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] “We initially used 3M software to help with reporting for the 1115 state Medicaid waiver,” Salazar explained. “Now that we’ve been operationalizing the analytics dashboard it’s a way to monitor performance and identify the areas where we need to improve quality.” Salazar’s colleague Heidy Colon-Lugo, a senior quality data analyst in the UHS health analytics unit, added that UHS has the Physician Compare module and “physicians can use it to track their own progress,” though the hospital has not yet put it into production at an enterprise level. “We see it as a tool that could be very beneficial on inpatient reporting. It’s on the to-do list – and it’s a gauge for population health management,” Salazar explained because it helps UHS track performance and quality. “If we’re doing a good job of care management and providing timely preventable care, that’s an avenue of keeping people healthy. We’re the downstream so if things are operating well we should see those changes to readmissions, costs, the Triple Aim.” Twitter: @SullyHIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.