Technology

By Girish Nadkarni, MD

In the past five years, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a strategic tool for businesses across various industries, including financial services, retail, and logistics. More recently, the healthcare industry has started to see the positive impact that AI and subsets such as machine learning can have in helping the industry solve critical medical issues. 

There are countless AI applications being developed across healthcare, many with transformational potential. From clinical research to hospital care, diagnostics and drug development, AI applications have the potential to fundamentally reshape the healthcare landscape over the next decade. 

One of the most promising applications of AI in healthcare today is in diagnostics and clinical decision support for chronic diseases. A great example of this is the use of AI to help combat the growing, worldwide epidemic of chronic kidney disease (CKD). The diagnosis of CKD and its progression has been challenging for decades. 

[Read more…] about Is AI the Key to Solving the Growing CKD Epidemic?

By Kyle Monticone

The healthcare industry is infamously reliant on data to define and drive organizational metrics.  Data outlines the quality of patient care, the productivity of employees, and the financial stability of the organization.  However, as organizations center their operations around data, they are woefully treading in the dangers of patient care.

In college, my professors taught my class to support our positions with peer-reviewed articles found in educational databases.  Any individual well-versed in academic research knows that there are often articles supporting both sides of an argument.  To circumvent this, professors taught our class to carefully manipulate the opposing argument to support our position, or to neglect the opposing argument altogether.  This danger carries over to the healthcare sector.

Process improvement (PI) departments and lean six sigma teams are the drivers of healthcare quality.  More organizations are hiring engineers and data analysts to provide reports to track custom metrics.  When used well, these teams can drive an organization forward.  More often than not, these teams are driving administrative decisions based upon arbitrary, unreliable, and manipulated data.  

[Read more…] about Data Unreliability in a Metric-Defining Age

By Kurt Hagerman

Today’s healthcare organizations have been tasked with focusing on more than just a patient’s health. There is a massive shift in their infrastructure, which is largely focused on support from technology. As the move to technology continues to expand, the move to the cloud is one of the most noteworthy contributors to the changing landscape of how healthcare organizations are enabling technology to help with everything from patient data, clinical, administrative, and financial functions. 

The adoption of cloud technology in healthcare delivery organizations specifically is largely driven by the cost and benefits of cloud infrastructure. The move to the cloud has taken healthcare by storm for good reasons—healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs), often short on cash, time, and technical staff, have found relief through a wide range of cloud solutions that can do anything from providing the perfect billing or health monitoring solution, to data capture, analysis, and even trending over time, leading them to increasingly rely on third-party vendors to support their businesses. The reign of monolithic, internally hosted healthcare applications is fast coming to an end.  

[Read more…] about Healthcare Delivery Organizations – Measuring Vendor Risk in a Cloud-Enabled World

Last year, healthcare was the leading industry for cyber attacks and data breaches, making up 41% of all cyber incidents. Ransomware can be devastating: In 2018, the billing vendor AccuDoc Solutions earned an inglorious record by enabling the hacking of 2.65 million patients data.

Whether healthcare organizations are just starting to move away from paper documents or already run on digital data, they must make data security their number one priority. Three fundamental questions can help them minimize risks:

1.     What are the organizational needs and expectations?

2.     What is the state of the infrastructure and IT set-ups?

3.     Who is responsible for accessing, collecting, and storing the data?

[Read more…] about Preventing Data Breaches: What Can Healthcare Organizations Do?

Amazon has taken over just about every other industry and its next target is healthcare e-commerce, estimated to have a market value of approximately $11 billion by 2023. One could even say that Amazon is in the midst of it, as they already made major moves in 2018. 

Earlier in the year, Amazon acquired online pharmacy PillPack, which manages multiple prescription medications for customers by pre-sorting, packaging, and delivering medication. This is significant because the pharmaceutical supply chain is ripe for disruption due to complexity and middlemen. PillPack simplifies the supply chain; improves the experience; and lowers the costs for patients, payers, and manufacturers. 

The company has also been said to be experimenting with becoming a B2B supplier. Like in pharmaceuticals, the healthcare B2B supply chain is over complicated and rife with middlemen: manufacturers negotiate with distributors, and distributors supply group purchasing organizations that negotiate for hospitals. 

[Read more…] about Amazon Takes on Healthcare E-Commerce — Are Businesses Prepared?

By Bart Copeland

Open source is powering significant innovation in machine learning (ML). And many are choosing Python for their ML initiatives. Let’s look at three use cases for Python-based ML in healthcare. 

ML and Python in healthcare

ML was first applied to tailoring antibiotic dosages for patients in the 1970s. But with the increased volume of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and the explosion in genetic sequencing data, healthcare’s interest in ML is now at an all-time high.

According to McKinsey Research, big data and machine learning in pharma and medicine could generate a value of up to $100 billion annually. That’s based on better decision-making, optimized innovation, improved efficiency of research and clinical trials, and the creation of new tools for physicians, consumers, insurers and regulators.

How does Python fit into this picture? It’s the go-to language for many developers, ranking as one of the most popular programming languages. And it’s used widely across various tech disciplines, from data engineers to web programmers. Python’s rising popularity includes data science and ML. And the emergence of open source language automation presents tremendous opportunities in healthcare for Python-based ML. And, by using open source language automation, Python language builds can be built in minutes with specific ML packages and be vetted for compliance with security and license criteria. 

[Read more…] about Using Python to Accelerate Machine Learning Possibilities in Healthcare

By Adam Stern

Cyber attacks happen.  A lot.  And more are happening all the time.

Online hacks in healthcare are enormously costly, and these costs are rising.  Seemingly every facet of digital life is potentially at risk, from hospital systems to patient records, imaging devices to lab results, billing and insurance files to pharmaceutical protocols.  Malware can play havoc with test results, ransomware can be the price of misdiagnosis, and lives can be on the line from breaches by unseen actors in unknown locales. 

While these threats transcend dollars and cents, the accounting is stark. According to NetDiligence’s Cyber Claims Study, healthcare and hospital cyber insurance claims represented 28 percent of total data breach costs in 2017: 

[Read more…] about Architecting the Cloud for Cybersecurity: It’s All About the Bones