Dr. John Halamka has taken to his <a href="http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-security-of-medical-devices.html">"Life as a Healthcare CIO" blog</a> to sound the alarm on medical device threats in the wake of the FDA late last week issuing its first cybersecurity warning about a specific medical device.
The medical community needs ethical guidelines for doctors who Google their patients for information because such a move can erode confidence and trust.
The theft of personal data on 4.5 million patients of Community Health Systems by hackers in China highlights the increasing degree to which hospitals are becoming lucrative targets for information theft.
When Glass was first unveiled at Google's annual I/O developer conference in the summer of 2012, it was seen mostly as an expensive novelty that would be available to only a select few "Explorers," at least for a few years. Today, the device is still not widely available, and it still costs $1,500, but it's proving to be much more than novel to some businesses and organizations. (Glass isn't the only form of wearable tech making waves in the enterprise; read "Wearables Offer Promise (and Peril) for the Enterprise" for details.)
Emergency room physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are four months into a pilot program where they are using Google's computerized eyeglasses to help treat patients.
Making use of the petabytes of patient data that healthcare organizations possess requires extracting it from legacy systems, normalizing it and then building applications that can make sense of it. That's a tall order, but the facilities that pull it off can learn a lot.
With 2013 coming to an end, we took our annual look back at quotes from news stories over the last 12 months. Here are a handful that stuck with us through the year: