What we don’t often talk about with natural disasters is the impact on healthcare and the role healthcare IT could play in helping during a disaster.  Plus, we often wait to talk about it after a disaster happens.  Since September is National Preparedness Month, we wanted to talk with an emergency preparedness expert, Lauren Knieser, Senior Director at Audacious Inquiry, to hear how they’re using Audacious Inquiry’s expertise in health data sharing to support natural disaster workers when a disaster hits.  

Learn more about Audacious Inquiry: https://ainq.com/ 

Find more great health IT content: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

Patients and physicians hate the referral process. It's inefficient, full of gaps and is frustrating for everyone involved. Yet the solution is simple: better relationships between referral partners. John Ellis from ReferralMD shares how improving referrals improves patient outcomes, saves $$$ and is what smart, growing practices are doing.   

Learn more at: https://getreferralmd.com/ 

Find more great Health IT Content: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

In order to share Magnolia Regional Health Center’s experience migrating EHRs, we sat down with Brian Davis, CHCIO, Chief Information Officer at Magnolia Regional Health Center, and Jim Hammer, PMP, SVP at Harmony Healthcare IT, to hear why they chose to only migrate part of the records to the new version of MEDITECH and what they did with the EHR data they didn’t migrate.  

Learn more about Harmony Healthcare IT: https://www.harmonyhit.com/ 

Find more great health IT content: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

We recently talked with Leon Lerman, CEO & Co-Founder of Cynerio, the leading provider of IoT cybersecurity and asset management solutions, about the security challenges healthcare faces.  In our interview, Lerman shared how important it was for healthcare organizations to have a well thought out plan to address risks associated with IoT devices.  

Learn more about Cynerio: https://www.cynerio.com/ 

Find more great health IT content: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

I recently sat down with Kevin Bridges, VP of Marketing and Business Development, and Marc LaFleur, VP of New Customer Development at Enovate Medical, to talk over all the various EHR documentation workstation options available today and how healthcare organizations should navigate them.  They share the latest options and the explosion of peripherals that are needed with the workstations.  They also talk about whether workstations need to be mobile or not and the evolution we've seen when it comes to mobility.  

If you want to understand some of the latest insights into how to better manage your healthcare workstations, you'll enjoy this interview.  

Learn more about Enovate Medical: https://www.enovatemedical.com/ 

Find more great health IT content: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

Memorial Health System (MHS) rapidly implemented Lifelink's conversational AI platform to help triage patients during COVID. Now that the pandemic is winding down, MHS is finding new ways to leverage the platform to improve patient experience and reduce staff burden.  

Learn more about Memorial Health System: https://www.choosememorial.org/ 

Learn more about Liflink Systems: https://www.lifelinksystems.com/ 

Find more great health IT content: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

While many people know DirectTrust for their work with direct messaging, over the years they’ve been doing more and more work when it comes to building Trust Frameworks.  Creating a trust framework that is trusted and respected by multiple organizations is a hard process, but a powerful one when done right.  

This is what makes the news that DirectTrust is assuming the assets of SAFE Identity really interesting.  For those not familiar with SAFE Identity, they provide a trust framework for the Biopharmaceutical industry where high levels of identity assurance are particularly important.  Going forward, SAFE Identity’s trust framework will be managed by DirectTrust and those in the SAFE Identity Policy Management Authority (PMA) will become DirectTrust members.  

To learn more about the aggregation of these trust frameworks, I sat down with Scott Stuewe, President and CEO, DirectTrust.  Along with diving deeper into DirecTrust’s mission and sharing how a trust framework works, he also shares details of what SAFE Identity is and how it will become part of the DirectTrust family.  Stuewe shares what the combined entities will offer old and new members of DirectTrust and what types of organizations might be interested in this joint work.  

Learn more about DirectTrust: https://directtrust.org/ 

Find more great health IT content: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

In a recent discussion with Gerry Blass, President & CEO of ComplyAssistant, he pointed out a number of things about ransomware that make it a unique challenge for healthcare organizations from a disaster recovery and business continuity perspective.  Not the least of which is that any healthcare organization could be hit by ransomware.  Plus, unlike many other disaster recovery situations, how much downtime you’ll have from ransomware is undetermined and may last for a long time.  

In the video below, you can learn more about how the world of disaster recovery and business continuity (DRBC) has been changing and what’s needed in healthcare organizations today.  Plus, Blass shares some of the common issues he sees in healthcare organizations DRBC plans.  

We also dive into whether healthcare organizations should pay the ransom and some of the challenges a healthcare organization will need to consider if they do want to pay the ransom (ie. $20k per day limit on buying bitcoin).  Blass also shares his thoughts on when to involve local police and the FBI and the benefits of doing so. Plus, he offers some good first steps that healthcare organizations can take to make sure they’re better prepared for disasters.  

Check out the interview below for more info on disaster recovery and business continuity and how ransomware has changed both of these important efforts.  

Learn more about ComplyAssistant: https://www.complyassistant.com/ 

Find more great Health IT content: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

A few good women in healthcare IT have put together an initiative that I thought would be worth highlighting to the health IT community at large.  Regular readers will be familiar with Janae Sharp who's been a regular contributor to Healthcare IT Today and is the Founder of the Sharp Index which works to address physician suicide in healthcare and reduce physician burnout.  She got together with Kat McDavitt, Founder, Principal Advisor and Head of Public Affairs at Innsena Communications, to create a new Mothers in Medicine Fund within the Sharp Index with Kat as the Founding donor.  

Learn more about the Mothers in Medicine Fund: https://www.mothersinmedicine.org/ 

Donate to the Cause: https://donorbox.org/mothers-in-medicine-fund?default_interval=o&amount=50

If you want to know about SDoH (Social Determinants of Health), who better to go to than a patient who's been working on SDoH for years.  That's why we were excited to interview Janice Tufte, Patient Collaborator at Hassanah Consulting, to learn about the state of SDoH today, how the pandemic has impacted it and many other things that are happening with SDoH including the HL7 Gravity Project.  

Learn more about Janice Tufte: https://janicetufte.com/ 

Find more great health IT content: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/