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The digital tool makes it easy for people to add a new device to their home – or clinic – Wi-Fi network.

The hospital’s director of biomedical engineering will discuss at HIMSS16 securely bringing biomedical devices into the network, including mitigating existing gaps.

Receiving a life-threatening health diagnosis can be frightening, confusing, and overwhelming. Unfortunately, how hospitals deliver subsequent medical information to patients and families can contribute to those feelings, rather than ease them. At St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, for example, families used to receive a large notebook of information during their initial hospital admission -- just hours or days after they had been informed of their child’s cancer diagnosis. “Receipt of this notebook did not ensure education,” said Dana McLure, Nursing Administration and Patient Care Services Project Manager, at St. Jude. “As a matter of fact, at times nurses would find the ‘education notebook’ had not been reviewed by the patient or family days after admission.” [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] Through the facility’s Shared Decision Making model of leadership, clinical nurses reported that indeed, patients and their families often “had little or no retention of the information that had been presented.” By incorporating what McLure called the “bedside caregiver perspective,” information overload and timing of patient education were identified as obstructions to both the patient experience and caregivers’ satisfaction. In a HIMSS16 session, “Watch and Learn: Transforming Patient Education,” on March 3, McLure and her colleague and Neely James, Systems Analyst for Patient Care Services Informatics at St. Jude, will focus on key ways to improve the transmission of such vital information. Migration from verbal or paper education to digital delivery makes sense in today’s world, in which patients and families are accustomed to learning and communicating via technology such as email, text message, websites, and more. A major discovery, they report, was that use of video education, whether live action or animation, provides a broader and more effective platform for information transfer. “Because we are a pediatric hospital many of our parents are millennials and more likely to be comfortable with information being delivered in a video format,” McLure said. “Our patients are definitely of the YouTube generation.” See all of our HIMSS16 previews Video presentations can provide demonstrations of procedures, proper use of devices, or even visual examples of symptoms, “which can lead to enhanced comprehension,” they continue. What’s more, they add, placing education into an on-demand video format “allows the patient or family to watch the education when it is convenient for them, as opposed to when the clinician provider has time to provide it.” And such videos can also be viewed more than one time based on the individual patient and family learning needs. “Determining when a patient or family is ready to learn is as important as determining what they need to know,” McLure said. The session "Watch and Learn: Transforming Patient Education," will take place from 1-2 p.m. on Thursday, March 3, in Lando 4201. 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.

(SPONSORED) Millions of people are struggling with conditions caused by neurological damage or disease. The future of treatment for many may not lie not in new and different drugs but in smart devices that can monitor, interpret and generate neurological signals. Data analytics is making these treatments possible.

Protenus, a health data protection startup co-founded when the owners were medical students at Johns Hopkins University, has raised $4 million in Series A funding. Arthur Ventures led the investment, joined by LionBird Venture Capital, DreamIt Ventures, Cognosante, TEDCO and the Baltimore Angels. [Also: Snooping employees sacked, disciplined after HIPAA breach] Protenus founders Robert Lord and Nick Culberson said they started the company to address the privacy concerns raised by the use of EHRs, particularly from insider threats and employee snooping. “Essentially, we’ve built an immune system for patient data that identifies when medical records are accessed inappropriately,“ Culbertson said in a press statement, announcing the funding. “Our product gives health systems the ability to deeply understand how and why medical records are accessed and whether or not there is a legitimate reason to look at a given patient’s medical or financial information.” As Culbertson explains it, Baltimore-based Protenus’ holistic approach to anomaly detection prioritizes the most suspicious events, so healthcare systems focus on actual threats, rather than noise and false positives. The easy-to-use visualizations and automated reporting take what can be a tedious and long investigation to down to resolution in a just a few minutes. Today, Protenus protects data throughout Johns Hopkins Health System. The company is in pilot stage with Inova Health System in Virginia and Maryland’s regional HIE, CRISP, which covers interchanges of data between nearly all health systems in the Maryland/DC area. Sage Growth Partners, a Baltimore-based Health IT consulting firm and adviser to Protenus, was instrumental in establishing the CRISP pilot. Johns Hopkins has been a partner to Protenus since the company’s inception, with the university’s dedication to protecting patient privacy serving as an a catalyst to the development of the product, the founders said. Twitter: @HealthITNews

The hacktivist group launched multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks against the hospital's servers in protest of the controversial custody case of Justina Pelletier.

Geeta Nayyar, MD, is the chief healthcare and innovation officer at management services organization Femwell Group Health, the host of Topline MD TV, and the co-founder and chief medical information officer of design-based strategy and analytics firm Abeyon. And at HIMSS16 she will join the ranks of Social Media Ambassadors credentialed to attend and cover the show. We asked Nayyar what she’s most interested in learning more about during the conference, her top health IT prediction for health IT in 2016 and the potential to apply analytics to social media to harness the power of massive networks around the world. Q: What are you most excited to see at HIMSS16? A: I’m looking for some very elegant user-centered design solutions.  Too often the tech products we are putting out in the industry leave the end user’s (doctor or patient) point of view to the end. Keeping the tech simple and elegant can go a long way and with all the patient centered discussion and focus I’m looking to see this play out in more products. Also looking for other non-healthcare industry leaders to help show us lessons learned. The advantage healthcare has is we are so far behind many other industries such as retail and banking. To the extent some of these representatives will be at HIMSS I’m interested in hearing those use cases and extrapolating what they mean to healthcare. Also looking for use cases and proof points, whether that’s a pilot or real life scenario that has played out such that we can glean the lessons learned. And I’m very jazzed to be at HX360 this year. That forum seems ideal for all of the above. Lastly, I always love to see old colleagues and friends and connect in real time. [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] Q: What is something about you that even your devout followers don't know? A: I’m a big tennis fanatic and love water sports of every kind.  I have a boating license and love to sail and kiteboard. Q: What is the untold benefit of social media in healthcare today? A: Today, a large number of consumers turn to social media for health information, physician reviews and even data research, making the healthcare industry one of the top industries to attract large numbers of audiences from everywhere on the globe on social networks.  I think we will see the analytics space growing around social media metrics and really help us understand what these networks currently are doing for patients and docs and what more can result from bridging massive networks across the globe. Q: What’s your one health IT prediction for 2016? A: The consumer continues to drive healthcare in 2016. As a result, I think we will see an uptake in telemedicine and remote monitoring solutions and communication solutions bridging docs and patients. I also think Big Data is only getting bigger — so we will see more solutions addressing how to better manage the data unfolding and put it into action. Q: What inspired to apply to the Social Media Ambassador program? A: As a former advisory board member of HIMSS I have always supported bringing different stakeholders in the industry together.  With the Presidential campaign upon us we all know how relevant and timely the state of the healthcare industry remains. The Social Media Ambassador program allows us to bring these different views together and amplify them and make connections for all of those in industry looking for solutions to the universal problems we continue to face.  Also, the program allows folks both present and not present to partake in this discussion and serves as an expansive network to count on both at HIMSS and after.  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.

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