Monthly Archives: February 2018

How Data Improves Patient Health

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Good compliance and patient engagement are two objectives in the healthcare world that converge more than one would think. Recent health trends have created patients more invested in their own health and willing to work with care providers to meet their objectives. This is outstanding for medical professionals looking to create a solid foundation for their patients and keep them as healthy as possible. However, it is all too easy to get caught up in a fad and make poor decisions, so another burgeoning aspect of patient engagement centers around correcting common misconceptions and getting individuals back on the right track.

In contrast, compliance is a process that happens beyond the perception of patients. As I’ve discussed in the past, an increase in sharing data also increases the need to secure systems and ensure that information is not compromised. However, safely giving patients access to their own data can help empower healthcare providers and patients alike.

While the mass exchange of data, both internally and to patient portals and other healthcare institutions, creates more points where it can be stolen, it also leads to opportunities to educate patients and involve them in the process. The increase in IoT wearables for patients that can track biological metrics also contributes to patient engagement as well as research. Some of these wearables, despite being an ever-present aspect of the lives of some individuals, do not provide data to the people that use them. Freeing up access to this data increases the number of ways that a patient can help sustain their own health.

This is, in many ways, the central premise of patient engagement. There is no one way to instill a desire for self-improvement in patients. The only thing that healthcare providers can do is give them the freedom and the tools to monitor their own health. Patient portals, for instance, give individuals access to their own records, allowing them to do the legwork of tracking their progress over time. Other systems may remind patients to adhere to medication schedules, or help work them through things like physical therapy.

It then falls to providers to achieve good compliance in order to safely give patients leeway to create the foundation for good health. In a competitive industry, a healthcare organization can fall behind if they do not provide a positive experience for patients—to say nothing about what can happen if compliance is not met.

These care providers stand at a crossroads, and they must decide in what ways they will innovate to improve patient outcomes. Compliance should not be a process of checking off boxes for the sake of staying in business—it should be leveraged as a strategic tool to reevaluate aging systems and promote engagement among patients. There are a plethora of other benefits as well, and savvy organizations can use compliance as an opportunity to rethink the way they conduct IT, saving costs and setting up better agility in the long term.

In short, the technology exists to help patients take control of their lives—but it’s up to organizations to adopt it in a safe way that still remains compliant. It may sound strange to some medical professionals to fixate on technology in this way, but the ideal of good patient engagement can only be reached if the systems behind it function seamlessly.

Human-Centered Design and What It Can Teach Us About Cybersecurity

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Even with the myriad of system vulnerabilities that can open the door for cyberattacks, the biggest vulnerability in any organization is the people. One mistake among employees can lead to the compromise of entire systems, and even individuals well versed in technology are not immune to error.

In the healthcare industry, closing up these gaps is more important than in most places. In addition to financial information, a cyberattack can compromise confidential medical records and erode trust in an organization. Establishing a strong cybersecurity foundation is but one step toward achieving compliance for a care provider, and is not just about setting up basic countermeasures.

Because the human element is impossible to fully remove from any system, it comes down to organizations to both educate employees on the finer points of cybersecurity and create systems that account for human error. Additionally, any security measures implemented should minimally impact the ability of other employees to do their jobs.

Enter Human-Centered Design (HCD). A concept which underlies any product or service, HCD refers to anything created with common human behavior in mind. For cybersecurity, HCD means designing in such a way that it accounts for mistakes that anyone may make.

Inevitably, the first step to promoting good security practices is education. Staff members are far more vulnerable to making errors if they don’t know what to look for. Standard employee training programs should account for these practices, especially in conjunction with training on certain computer systems. Give them some perspective on how these attacks spread; knowing the extent to which opening a suspect email can cause problems can help employees proceed with caution.

Education should ideally go beyond a simple presentation and strive to engage employees. These sessions should allow for individual input and explain the costs of a breach. Beyond prevention, they should also be aware of steps they should take if they believe that they have been targeted or that a system has been compromised. This can involve outreach to IT departments and easy ways to contact them and make them aware of a potential problem as soon as possible.

Marin General Hospital even included a system for reporting attacks, rewarding any employee that reports a threat to IT.

As an IT professional, it can be easy to get slotted into a specific way of thinking. Tools and techniques that seem commonplace may be utterly alien to some employees. As a result, be aware of the ways that each employee interacts with a given system and strive to seamlessly integrate a solution into their daily work. For instance, setting up the infrastructure to encrypt emails can be difficult, but doing so on a limited basis based on the people that each employee interacts with the most frequently can seriously cut down on potential vulnerabilities.

Programs to bolster cybersecurity are created not only to fix technical issues, but to hedge against internal mistakes from employees. Even with hackers creating more and more advanced malware, the simplest phishing scheme can still cost an organization thousands of dollars. By designing a cybersecurity program to conform to the needs of employees, IT professionals can prevent the possibility of attacks before they can even happen.