Digital as the Differentiator for Biopharma and Medtech

Digital as the Differentiator for Biopharma and Medtech

With the Inflation Reduction Act now on the books, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will begin negotiating drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. That, combined with other headwinds such as increased competition from me-too drugs, and ever-present pricing pressure from payers, means that pharma players now more than ever need a new and powerful tool to differentiate their products. We believe the next decade of transformation is digital.
Learning from the auto industry Almost every industry has had to confront a fundamental existential question: What is our product? Consider the automotive industry, which once was largely about hardware…

Continue Reading
‘A Better Long-Term Solution’: How Health Systems Keep Workloads in the Cloud Secure

‘A Better Long-Term Solution’: How Health Systems Keep Workloads in the Cloud Secure

The evaluation process covers ­everything from compatibility to cost and the quality of customer service, but it also includes a comprehensive risk assessment led by the health system’s CISO.“Any vendor we’re potentially going to use must go through that assessment,” Meadows says. “We ask them about everything — their security infrastructure, their policy and procedure management, how they segment their networks — and then, based on their response, we can determine whether they’re a good fit or not.”
Cook Children’s also relies on a third-party system that allows it to check whether a particular vendor has experienced significant security issues in the…

Continue Reading
Hurdle, CloudLIMS Partner to Augment Diagnostic Lab Capabilities

Hurdle, CloudLIMS Partner to Augment Diagnostic Lab Capabilities

What You Should Know:– Hurdle (a Chronomics Inc. brand), a global bio-infrastructure platform that powers end-to-end diagnostics for life sciences, labs and healthcare providers, and CloudLIMS, a leading SOC 2 compliant and ISO 9001:2015 certified lab informatics provider, announced today that the companies have entered into a strategic partnership marking the first integration between a Diagnostic as a Service (DaaS) platform and a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) LIMS provider.– The partnership brings together Hurdle’s remote diagnostic platform and CloudLIMS’s secure, purpose-built diagnostics LIMS to empower labs with the ability to offer at-home tests, and manage lab processes and data efficiently.Helping Diagnostic Labs Stay…

Continue Reading
Which Moves Should Providers Watch From Amazon, CVS & Walgreens This Year?

Which Moves Should Providers Watch From Amazon, CVS & Walgreens This Year?

Primary care has been historically dominated by traditional providers that deliver care via fee-for-service models, but retail companies have been amping up their efforts to disrupt the space in recent years. Over the next decade, it will become increasingly difficult for hospitals and other traditional healthcare providers to ignore these disruptors, according to a recent report from the American Hospital Association. 
The report cited a Bain & Company analysis that predicted disruptors could own as much as 30% of the $260 billion primary care market by 2030. So what moves by Amazon, Walmart and CVS will the industry need to watch to…

Continue Reading
Singapore's iHiS taps Google Cloud, Accenture to drive healthcare innovation

Singapore’s iHiS taps Google Cloud, Accenture to drive healthcare innovation

Integrated Health Information Systems, Singapore’s national healthcare technology agency, has collaborated with Google Cloud and Accenture to promote the development of data-driven applications to “deliver more high-quality and digital-first healthcare experiences.”Accenture is helping deploy Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, which will provide third-party developers access to data and services across iHiS’s managed systems to create new applications and capabilities. 
The resulting flexible API-based architecture from this collaboration will serve as a “connective tissue across data sources and applications,” as per iHiS assistant chief executive Alan Goh. 
Google Cloud has also built security features into the Apigee platform to provide iHiS full visibility over…

Continue Reading
What Is PHI, and How Can Healthcare Organizations Keep It Secure?

What Is PHI, and How Can Healthcare Organizations Keep It Secure?

What Is Protected Health Information?According to UC Berkeley’s Human Research Protection Program, PHI includes any information found in medical records or clinical data sets that can be used to identify an individual. In addition, this information must have been collected, used or disclosed while providing a healthcare service. PHI can be used during the diagnosis or treatment of a patient or in clinical research processes.
The HIPAA Privacy Rule and Security Rule require the protection of identifiable health information, such as:
Information collected by doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers in the medical record
Conversations between doctors and other healthcare providers about a patient’s…

Continue Reading
How Technology Integration Supports Precision Medicine

How Technology Integration Supports Precision Medicine

Precision Health Can Be Applied to All DisciplinesThe University of California, Irvine, has integrated its technology to create targeted health and wellness strategies for patients. In February 2022, the university launched the Institute for Precision Health, an interdisciplinary campuswide initiative to develop solutions in precision medicine. A future brick-and-mortar home for IPH will let data scientists collaborate with clinicians to develop analytics tools.
“Precision health is truly an amalgamation of multiple critical pillars. Understanding the multidisciplinary nature of this work is really how IPH came about,” says Dr. Peter Chang, ­assistant professor in residence at UCI’s Department of Radiological Sciences. He formed…

Continue Reading
How Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Reduces Clinician Burnout, Improves Patient Care

How Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Reduces Clinician Burnout, Improves Patient Care

Burnout is taking its toll on healthcare. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy notes that half of healthcare workers report symptoms of burnout that range from insomnia to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. A Bain survey found that 25 percent of clinicians are considering switching careers, with burnout the No. 1 factor in those feelings. One strategy for combatting burnout is wider adoption of technology, particularly for automating routine and time-consuming tasks such as documentation. Bringing automation to clinicians isn’t without challenges, however. It takes time to identify the right solutions, implement…

Continue Reading
Hands-on cardiac education pays dividends for patients and others, says Abiomed

Hands-on cardiac education pays dividends for patients and others, says Abiomed

At a Heart Recovery Advocate Day held on February 3 at Abiomed’s Danvers, Massachusetts, headquarters, patients shared their stories of heart recovery, toured the facility, participated in lab demonstrations and had the opportunity to meet the operators who made their left ventricular assist devices, right ventricular assist devices and lung-assist devices.Connecting patients with each other, and with technologists
Beyond pictures, videos and surgical explanations, many cardiology intervention patients want to know more about the technology that enabled their heart recovery. 
That is clear from the 24 survivors that experienced planned or unplanned percutaneous coronary interventions and cardiogenic shock events and who attended the largest…

Continue Reading
6 Essential Security Controls for Managing East-West Network Traffic

6 Essential Security Controls for Managing East-West Network Traffic

Control 1: Gain Visibility with a Flow Traffic AnalyzerA flow traffic analyzer is a visibility tool capable of reporting normal network traffic flow data for all peripheral devices, along with anomaly detection against known good baselines. Not only do flows provide a convenient unit for traffic measurement, most popular security information and event management solutions accept flows to augment detection capabilities. Capturing contextual data, such as traffic volume, port origination and destination, network path and quality of service — along with who generated what data and when — provides useful information for effective treatment of traffic through policy.
Consequently, an effective access…

Continue Reading