Information technology in health care encompasses everything from wearing a blood pressure monitor on your wrist to millions of electronic health records (EHRs) floating around in cyberspace. Beckers' Hospital Review gathered ten hospital executives and asked them what they considered the most concerning trends in health information technology.
Half of the ten health care execs named the rising risk and frequency of cyberattacks. That may mean an employee innocently opening a phishing email containing a virus (baby goats really are super cute!) to having a health care system's EHRs locked up by ransomware, while hackers await the payment of cash or cybercash.
266 million patient records have been exposed by cybersecurity attacks since HIPAA implemented its reporting requirement in 2009. What do health care's policy makers and stakeholders have planned to make our medical records more accurate and keep them secure? You'll find the answers in Chapter 14 of Patient or Pawn?.