Workflow-Aware Outreach Contributes to Healthcare Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity presents a huge, ongoing challenge for healthcare organizations across the board. Information systems, medical devices, and patient data must be protected at all times, but many hospitals and practices cannot afford to retain in-house personnel solely dedicated to security. At the same time, they often lack the technology infrastructure needed to identify and track security threats and subsequently translate threat data into action.

What’s more, healthcare workers regularly and mistakenly assume their IT network and supported devices function with a low level of cybersecurity vulnerability.

An industry task force, established by the Cybersecurity Act of 2015, reported to Congress last June with recommendations for shaping an urgent response. The group set forth expectations for healthcare cybersecurity and called for increased protections for and resilience of IT systems and supported devices. The task force also addressed human factors by emphasizing workforce readiness enabled by improved cybersecurity awareness and education.

An Effective Action Plan

Forward-thinking facilities recognize that disparate IT systems and devices must interoperate within a unified scheme. For example, when Marin General Hospital, located north of San Francisco, updated system-wide security in 2016, the executive who led the project went beyond filling in technology gaps.

Jason Johnson, Marin’s chief information security officer, told Healthcare IT News: “We took a different approach to focus on the person and people [involved] because we knew that would be the hardest needle to move and the most difficult to change.”

Johnson’s team instituted mandatory security awareness training, going so far as to integrate it within new employee orientation. Additionally, the project team interviewed clinical staff to gain an understanding of their daily workflows. That effort identified caregivers’ top channels of email communication, which paved the way for the build-out of encryption “tunnels” that could seamlessly lock down emails containing patients’ protected health information.

The results? One year after the project started, Marin reported a 50 percent drop in system vulnerabilities, along with 100 percent staff participation in security awareness efforts. Click rates on malicious emails fell from 63 percent to a practically non-existent 0.5 percent.

Departmental outreach was key, concluded Johnson. “Once people were convinced it was a good idea and everyone was onboard, security became a requirement,” he explained. Every new project or contract now requires a standardized security review.

Integration and the Human Factor

As the Marin case shows, technology integration can flourish through an approach that takes into account human responsibilities on the front lines of care. Healthcare is notorious for dependence on “tribal knowledge” — individualized bits of information residing in staff members’ heads or scribbled on post-it notes — and such vulnerabilities often aren’t readily apparent. However, workflow-based analysis takes into account human factors prior to revamping core processes.

Further, technology such as NetDirector’s HealthData Exchange platform, which automates the sharing of clinical and billing data, frees up labor resources by simplifying the integration process. As a result, care providers can spend more time focusing on patient needs while technologists keep a watchful eye on ever-present compliance and cybersecurity issues.

For more information on HealthData Exchange, please contact us or request a free demo.

On the Horizon: What Healthcare Technology Needs in 2018

The year ahead will usher in an imposing financial squeeze for hospitals across the country. Moody’s Investor Service expects the healthcare sector’s operating cash flow to contract by 2 to 4 percent through 2018 as facilities grapple with lower insurance reimbursements and higher expense growth. Accordingly, hospitals and health systems must leverage information technology (IT) to optimize operations, sustain strategic initiatives and drive disruptive innovations.

Leading organizations will move beyond using IT to automate formerly manual processes. Instead, they’ll build IT-powered business models to align with predictive/ proactive care delivery while empowering patients to take charge of their own health.

As in recent years, healthcare executives remain rightfully concerned about enhancing cybersecurity, countering potential attacks and preparing for response by moving more of their IT infrastructure to the cloud.

They also see competitive opportunities to scale up IT in areas such as consumer-facing technology, data analytics, and virtual care. As such, integration will be key to merging patient-generated data with health records, exploring genomic testing as part of a move toward personalized medicine, and providing reimbursable care or monitoring for remote patients.

Paths Forward

Many industry observers point to cloud-based systems when explaining attempts to “future-proof” technology investments. “[Cloud computing] can offer a dramatically lower total cost of ownership than traditional on-premises solutions by eliminating maintenance fees and upgrade costs, and by requiring much less effort to install and operate,” says Mark LaRow, CEO of patient-matching technology vendor Verato.

At the same time, healthcare organizations stand to benefit from enhancing existing IT platforms, especially where revenue-driving processes and workflows overlap. In particular, providers are looking for ways to facilitate operations through automated insurance eligibility processes, mobile/ online payment applications, and cost estimation tools.

Additionally, advanced hospitals and health systems recognize that increasingly accepted value-based payment models require ongoing patient engagement measures. Advisory firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) notes that providers need to obtain a comprehensive view of patient interactions. “An ability to derive meaningful information from linking disparate data about patients becomes a differentiator for an organization in a competitive market,” comments Winjie Miao, chief experience officer at Texas Health Resources.

Meanwhile, 88 percent of insurers plan investments in technology to improve the healthcare experience for their members. With providers and payers moving toward shared goals in data aggregation and analysis, “2018 could be the year [that] health sectors rally around the patient experience,” according to PwC.

A Platform Built for Integration

NetDirector’s subscription-model integration services fall squarely in line with healthcare organizations’ IT needs in the coming year. From a broad perspective, NetDirector’s HealthData Exchange normalizes data to standard HL7 or other formats, enabling systems to seamlessly share clinical and billing data. While complementing existing IT investments, the platform streamlines clinical workflow and communications while reducing administrative costs.

NetDirector also remains adaptive to changes in the healthcare ecosystem, such as those anticipated for 2018. New integrations can be configured based on evolving customer needs — and on standards and protocols defined by healthcare’s governing bodies.

For more information, please contact us or request a free demo.

NetDirector and myCatalyst Partnership Relieves Data Troubles and Eases Integration Process for Improved Healthcare Outcomes

TAMPA, Fla., Jan. 3, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — NetDirector, a cloud-based data exchange and integration platform, has further solidified its presence in the healthcare data environment through a partnership with data-centric, actionable analytics and reporting company myCatalyst, Inc. This collaboration will allow both companies to grow their already strong data integration capabilities, and ultimately improve patient care coordination for all their clients.

With a focus on care coordination and P4O reimbursement models through the support of clinically integrated networks, myCatalyst compiles data from all areas and providers involved in member/population health management. myCatalyst surpasses the limits of data warehousing and, with the collaboration of NetDirector, provides seamless integration with other vendor systems. This includes synchronizing member data and providing physicians and employers with the opportunity to develop a proactive, strategic approach.

The partnership focuses on providing a cloud-based, zero-footprint data integration solution that will allow myCatalyst to connect to even more Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems and Hospital Imaging Systems (HIS).

Robin Foust, co-developer and co-owner of myCatalyst, shared that “joining the NetDirector ecosystem will help myCatalyst connect faster with even more EHRs and HIS systems, and provide for better coordination between components of healthcare. This will allow our customers to achieve optimal efficiency and healthcare outcomes through data integration and collaborative care.”

With the volume and quality of data in healthcare continuing to surge, it is important for companies to leverage that data towards population health and information-driven patient care. The combination of NetDirector and myCatalyst allows healthcare providers and organizations to quickly and accurately exchange data through a multitude of interfaces available to them, without doing the heavy lifting themselves and taking on the additional responsibility of managing data in the cloud.

Using results from encounters, assessments, biometric data, medical, pharmacy claims, and more, myCatalyst compiles data onto a dashboard, and provides the tools necessary to enable physician practices to track patient progress, identify gaps in care, and achieve optimal financial and healthcare outcomes, and to provide data analytics and reporting to support the same for the populations and patients being served (ACO, Employers, Clinically Integrated Networks, Direct-To-Primary Care [DPC], and more).

“Our partnership with myCatalyst is a major step towards providers leveraging the wealth of data available to them,” said Harry Beisswenger, CEO of NetDirector. “We’re excited to be able to assist in bringing a service like myCatalyst to more employer groups and healthcare providers efficiently and securely with our cloud-based HealthData Exchange.

More about NetDirector:

NetDirector provides a secure cloud-based data and document exchange solution for the healthcare and mortgage banking industries to deliver seamless data integration between parties. NetDirector bridges gaps created by disparate systems & technologies by allowing companies at any location to share data & documents securely over a single internet connection with any other member of the ecosystem. Our approach allows trading partners to collaborate and exchange data in a seamless, bi-directional, real-time manner. With security and longevity as a focus, NetDirector is a certified HIPAA Compliant and SOC II Type 2 certified company, a 6-year member of the prominent Inc. 5000, and currently processes more than 9 million transactions per month. Learn more at web.netdirector.biz.

More about myCatalyst:

myCatalyst (MCI), is a private Health Information Exchange (HIE) and system support for population health, providing data integration, actionable prescriptive analytics, meaningful reporting, care coordination support, service solutions & more – resulting in optimal financial and healthcare outcomes for populations served, and the organizations serving those populations.  MCI is known for collaborative problem solving to ensure client and program success.

Learn more by contacting: Help@myCatalyst.com