Data Warehousing
At Health Datapalooza this week, exactly how information gets analyzed is up for new ways to be disrupted, revamped and rethought. The theme: endless possibilities. In fact, the ways that the gathering of the appropriate data and the analysis of it can improve health outcomes is astounding. But first the right data must to be collected.
Tech titans like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple already have made huge investments in artificial intelligence to deliver tailored search results and build virtual personal assistants. That approach is starting to trickle down into healthcare too.
It seems that everybody under the sun has been asking "you're in the cloud, right?" But it's important to take a step back and realize that not all clouds are equal. Maybe it's time for people to be asking, "Are you doing the cloud right?"
Information is money. And data brokers, companies that mine consumers' personal information and sell to the highest bidder, know this more than anyone. Their practices in collecting said data, however, have recently come under fire.
A new report from the Institute for Healthcare Information Technology finds ample opportunity for job-seekers in Georgia, with thousands of IT roles waiting to be filled between providers and vendors.
Disaster recovery traditionally hasn't had a very high priority in healthcare IT. Everyone knew it was important, but it came far down the list of spending priorities. That's changed significantly in the past five years.
When even the Department of Homeland Security is warning against using Internet Explorer, it's a safe bet its security flaws are serious. But for many healthcare providers -- notably those still running on Windows XP -- IE's recently-exposed vulnerabilities won't be fixed by Microsoft.
Healthcare security is a multifaceted, ever-shifting challenge -- and all it takes is one missed cue for a costly breach to ensue, says Heather Roszkowski, chief information security officer of Fletcher Allen Healthcare. Technology can give a broader view of where data is, and who's doing what with it.
As the volume and variety of medical images increases, providers are looking for better ways to store and access them. Vendor neutral archives are fast finding favor -- but in many respects the jury is still out on just what a VNA is and what it should offer.
Effective use of analytics is "not something you can buy from a vendor; it's an organizational and cultural value that has to grow and mature," said James E. Gaston, speaking Thursday at the Healthcare IT News/HIMSS Media Healthcare Business Intelligence Forum in Washington.