Computer Security Risks for Healthcare

Computer theft recovery firm Absolute Software publised a year ago (Feb 2009) a list of top 5 computer security risk for healthcare institutions
http://www.securityinfowatch.com/root+level/1288605
1. Failure to Protect Sensitive Data Beyond Encryption
2. Inability to Accurately Manage Mobile Computer Assets
3. Sensitive Information on Public Terminals
4. Difficulty Implementing a Comprehensive Data Security Plan
5. Reluctance to Create a Data Breach Policy

Email experiences in Telemedicine - It is not all about Cost, but also about the Quality of Service

Location: Urban teaching Hospital in Western India and a Rural Primary Care-center
Subject: 182 newborn babies
Email traffic: 309 messages sent from the Rural Primary Care-center and 272 messages from the Urban teaching Hospital at an average response/reply time of 11.3 hrs.
Outcome:
38 babies were referred to the intensive care unit at the Urban teaching Hospital after these consultations and the remaining 144 babies were managed at the Rural Primary Care-center.
Telemedicine (via email) helped in the diagnosis, referral, treatment and follow-up of patients.
Cost to benefit ratio of 1:45
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12217120

Alert and Caution on the Security threats to Social Networking sites

Consistent with any other facets of public life, it is prudent to be alert of the anti-social activities in this exploding public domain. The higher enrollment and traffic (reported by the networking sites) may account to the rise in security threats as well.
Here is a summary of Sophos report - http://www.sophos.com/sophos/docs/eng/papers/sophos-security-threat-report-jan-2010-wpna.pdf

• 57% of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites, a rise of 70.6% from last year
• 36% reveal they have been sent malware via social networking sites, a rise of 69.8% from last year
• 72% of firms surveyed are worried that employee usage of social networking sites places their firms at risk
• Survey respondents identified Facebook as the social networking site posing the greatest security risks
• 49% of companies survey allow their employees unrestricted access to Facebook, up from 36% a year ago

Focus on HealthCare IT

US Govt. is funding $975 million in grants to states and healthcare providers to implement health information technology. The funding is available for 100,000 hospitals and primary care physicians across US by 2014. The funding is to advance the exchange of health information at the state level, develop regional extension centers to assist health care workers on health IT and support 55 training programs in 30 states to develop job skills of, as many as 15000 people in the health IT field.

http://www.pharmacychoice.com/News/article.cfm?Article_ID=535065

Comprehensive view of the future of health care by Dr. Yellowlees

Dr. Peter Yellowlees ebook at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1465 is a very well written, comprehensive view of the changing face of healthcare with the widening influence of the Internet, especially in the most populous parts of the world. The book makes the reader think whether he/she is ready for the evolution in healthcare. Dr. Peter Yellowlees is in an elite league that blends the view of a health practitioner, leading academician, technology evangelist and visionary.

Intent

The intent of this bloging effort is to share ideas and thoughts in the various fields of informatics that spans Health Informatics

Introduction

I lead an Analytics team that spans Health Services. I am fortunate to work with Software product companies, information audit services and finally Analytics (out of interest and opportunities that opened out on the way). Health Informatics is a field of interest and hence a natural career choice for me. I am looking to get a deeper understanding of the various sub-specialties (such as telemedicine) within HealthInformatics.