Beth Israel Deaconess

See the following -

Hacking Health Care Records Reaches Epidemic Proportions

Nsikan Akpan | Scientific American | March 29, 2016

In February 2015, Anthem made history when 78.8 million of its customers were hacked. It was the largest health care breach ever, and it opened the floodgates on a landmark year. More than 113 million medical records were compromised last year, according to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) under Health and Human Services. Consider it this way: if each case represented a single individual, one in three Americans would have been a victim...

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Halamka's Dispatch from Israel

This week Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker led a trip of clinicians, industry leaders, government officials, academics, and entrepreneurs to visit Israel (not at taxpayer expense) on a mission to establish Massachusetts as an incubator for the US growth of Israeli companies. I represented the healthcare IT innovation work we’re doing at Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School. Israel is a remarkable place. With 8 million people in a nation the size of New Jersey situated in an unstable part of the world, Israel has no choice but to be a start up nation, creating companies that generate economic impact world wide...

Navigating between Heavy-weight and Light-weight Standardization

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPAA | August 25, 2016

Andy Oram

FHIR is large and far-reaching but deliberately open-ended. Many details are expected tovary from country to country and industry to industry, and thus are left up to extensions that various players will design later. It is precisely in the extensions that the risk lurks of reproducing the Tower of Babel that exists in other health care standards. The reason the industry have good hopes for success this time is the unusual way in which the Argonaut project was limited in both time and scope. It was not supposed to cover the entire health field, as standards such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) try to do. It would instead harmonize the 90% of cases seen most often in the US. For instance, instead of specifying a standard of 10,000 codes, it might pick out the 500 that the doctor is most likely to see. 

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The Apple Platform for Wellness Arrives

Today I’m sitting at the Flint Center in Cupertino where Steve Jobs introduced the first MacIntosh...Now, 30 years later, we’re on the cusp of a different kind of revolution - the consumerization of healthcare middleware that gathers data about your body/activity from multiple sensors and consolidates it into a secure container on your personal smartphone.  No cloud storage is used. Read More »