Government & Policy

While testifying on the VA FY 2025 and FY 2026, the Veterans Affairs Secretary said the agency plans to reinvest prior appropriated unused funds into new releases of its Oracle electronic health records next year.

Over time interoperability standards have had a broadening effect on the healthcare technology industry, and the pace of improvements has increased, to the benefit of patients, says Michael Nusbaum, president of MH Nusbaum & Associates.  

And in other news, CISA directs federal agencies on Microsoft breach by Russian operatives.

Also: CloudWave and FDA extend their threat intelligence partnership to offer an open-source vendor assessment framework.

Senators Hawley and Blumenthal asked UnitedHealth Group how Change Healthcare's systems were breached, why the clearinghouse suffered "such an egregious and unexplained outage" and the extent of data compromised in the ransomware attack.

The agency says threat actors are targeting organizations' IT help desks with phone calls from a local area code claiming to be revenue cycle or administrator employees. After gaining access, they divert legitimate payments.

S.A.R.A.H. is a 24/7 digital health promoter prototype, available by video or text in eight languages, trained with biological artificial intelligence to provide health information, including mental health resources.

The health system's new remote acute care unit aims to improve healthcare access and equity for eligible patients with daily clinical home visits and remote patient monitoring through its Medically Home technology.

Citing compliance strains on providers and others, and the need to maintain patient care continuity, more than 200 virtual care stakeholders urged the agency to release its regulatory scheme for the prescribing of controlled substances through telehealth.

The Rewards for Justice program seeks information leading to the identification or location of any ALPHV BlackCat-linked cyber actor. The group claimed credit for the destabilizing Feb. 21 Change Healthcare ransomware attack.