U.S. health insurer WellPoint Inc and computer giant IBM agreed to commercially use IBM's Watson technology that could help physicians identify best treatment options.
The new system being developed will have the ability to look at massive amounts of medical literature and arrive at best treatment solutions, the companies said in a statement.
A medical privacy breach led to the public posting on a commercial Web site of data for 20,000 emergency room patients at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., including names and diagnosis codes, the hospital has confirmed. The information stayed online for nearly a year.
Since discovering the breach last month, the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet made its way from one of its vendors, a billing contractor identified as Multi-Specialty Collection Services, to a Web site called Student of Fortune, which allows students to solicit paid assistance with their schoolwork.
Scandals, recalls, stingy customers, anxious regulators--any one of these would traumatise a chief executive. America's industry for medical devices is suffering from all of them. Omar Ishrak, the new boss of Medtronic, the world's biggest medical-technology company, recently described the problem succinctly to analysts: "There is a lot of work ahead of us." This is a relatively new ailment for the industry. From 1998 to 2005 the use of equipment such as defibrillators and drug-eluting stents expanded rapidly. "It was the age of implantation in this country," explains David Lewis of Morgan Stanley, with companies "sticking things into everybody." Much has changed.
A medical privacy breach led to the public posting on a commercial Web site of data for 20,000 emergency room patients at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., including names and diagnosis codes, the hospital has confirmed. The information stayed online for nearly a year. Since discovering the breach last month, the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet made its way from one of its vendors, a billing contractor identified as Multi-Specialty Collection Services, to a Web site called Student of Fortune, which allows students to solicit paid assistance with their schoolwork. Gary Migdol, a spokesman for Stanford Hospital and Clinics, said the spreadsheet first appeared on the site on Sept. 9, 2010, as an attachment to a question about how to convert the data into a bar graph.
In U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' annual report to Congress, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius reported that between Jan. 1, 2010, and Dec. 31, 2010, breaches involving 500 or more individuals were less than 1% of the breaches reported, but accounted for more than 99% of the more than 5.4 million individuals who were affected. As part of the Health IT for Economic and Clinical Health Act, the HHS secretary is required to annually report to Congress on the number and nature of data breaches, and actions taken to respond to the breaches. The number is growing because between Sept. 23, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2009, breaches involving 500 or more individuals were less than 1%, but accounted for more than 99% of the more than 2.4 million individuals affected by a breach of protected health information. The largest breaches occurred as a result of a theft, an error, or failure to adequately secure protected health information. The greatest number of incidents resulted from human or technological error and involved the protected health information of just one individual, HHS' report said. The largest breaches in 2010, much like 2009, occurred as a result of a theft, HHS reported.
If Meaningful Use of electronic health records is ever going to fulfill its promise of better care at lower cost, clinical decision support (CDS) systems had better play a central role delivering relevant medical evidence to the point of care, according to one veteran informatics physician and patient safety advocate. "The evidence of best treatment, if not the right treatment, is available probably 85% of the time," Dr. Jeffrey Rose, VP of clinical excellence and informatics at St. Louis-based Ascension Health, tells InformationWeek Healthcare. Unfortunately, information is not often readily accessible. This opinion runs counter to a widely cited statement by Kaiser Permanente's Dr. David Eddy that just 15% of medical treatment is supported by scientific evidence. "That's old and wrong," according to Rose, a former chief medical officer of EHR vendor Cerner. "When you do further studies, information is available, it's just not in the clinical environment."