⚕️AI in Healthcare Cybersecurity

Good Morning! It’s the Friday before the long weekend and we’re back with your weekly dose of updates from the world of HealthTech.
Let’s dive right in!

DEEP DIVE
AI in Healthcare Cybersecurity

• 725 data breaches were reported to OCR and more than 133 million records were exposed or impermissibly disclosed.

• Data breaches are one of the common healthcare cybersecurity attacks. Phishing, ransomware, and malpractice claims follow suit. 

AI plays a crucial role in enhancing healthcare cybersecurity by providing advanced tools and techniques to protect sensitive medical data and systems from cyber threats. Here’s how AI contributes to healthcare cybersecurity:

1. Cyber Threat Detection: AI analyzes large data volumes to detect and forecast threats in real-time, using machine learning to adapt to new vulnerabilities and improve overall security.

2. Threat Prevention: AI identifies anomalies and unusual activities that may signal threats, allowing for quick responses and preventing complex attacks.

3. Security Measures: AI enhances cybersecurity through multi-point defense strategies, strong encryption, access controls, and plays a key role in incident response.

4. Compliance and Privacy: AI ensures adherence to regulations like HIPAA by monitoring data access, automating audits, and protecting patient privacy with rapid detection of irregularities.

Take a deep dive into AI’s role in ramping up cybersecurity here.

DEEP DIVE
7 Most Promising Areas For Generative AI in Healthcare

• More than 70% of healthcare organizations either have already adopted or plan to implement generative AI.

Here are the areas that healthcare leaders believe will benefit the most from generative AI, according to a survey of 100 executives (across providers, payers, and health services/technology companies).

1. Clinician/clinical productivity: 73%

2. Patient/member engagement and experience: 62%

3. Administrative efficiency and effectiveness: 60%

4. Quality of care/service delivery: 48%

5. IT/infrastructure: 42%

6. Research and education: 30%

7. Strategy and growth: 28%

PULSE POINTS
Latest Breakthroughs This Week

Here’s the most important breakthroughs and advancements we spotted in the healthcare technology space this week.

• AI in Pediatric Healthcare: Children's National Hospital is advancing five AI projects in collaboration with Virginia Tech. These projects focus on forecasting emergency department surges, training deep-learning models without sharing patient data, predicting sepsis risk by extracting clinical variables, generating facial images to detect genetic syndromes, and predicting cellular responses to genetic changes in pediatric disorders. The collaboration aims to harness AI's transformative potential in pediatric healthcare

• Remote Monitoring For Pediatric Respiratory Viruses: OSF OnCall, the digital arm of OSF HealthCare, has launched a remote patient monitoring program for pediatric respiratory viruses. The program provides at-home support, 24/7 access to care teams, and monitoring tools to manage symptoms and prevent hospitalization. It is available to patients in Illinois and Michigan with a confirmed respiratory infection diagnosis or a positive test result.

• AI Agent For Patient Access Center: MUSC Health has introduced a new AI agent named "Emily" to assist in their patient access center. Emily, powered by SoundHound AI, helps answer calls, manage appointments, and respond to nonclinical questions. The AI agent is integrated with MUSC Health's Epic EHR system.

• New Suite of AI Enabled Products: NRC Health has launched its first AI-enabled products, powered by its AI engine Huey, and acquired Nobl, a firm focused on improving rounding efficiency in healthcare. The new products include:

  • nGage: Captures patient and employee feedback in natural language.

  • nQuire: Aggregates and summarizes feedback data.

  • nVolve: Enables predictive conversations for improving experiences.

  • nLighten: Creates summaries for clinical coaching.

  • nAct: Automates service recovery with response recommendations.

  NRC Health also partnered with Medallia to enhance consumer experience by identifying shortcomings and benchmarks.

EXPERT SPOTLIGHT
Renu Gehring: AI “A Set Of Russian Dolls”

This week, HealthTech Zen got in touch with Renu Gehring, a technology leader with 20 years of experience in creating healthcare solutions that solve healthcare problems

What role does/will artificial intelligence play in your current and future projects?

First, let me clarify that I view Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a broad field that includes Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL).  Think of it like a set of Russian dolls. AI is the largest doll, containing ML as the next smaller doll.  Within ML, there is another small doll called DL. 

ML has played a star role in my past projects, among which two stand out. The first involved the prediction of Emergency Department utilization to move patient care to urgent or primary care modalities. The second project involved categorization of patient emails for improved patient retention and satisfaction.  

For the past 2-4 years, I have been leading initiatives where DL is a key element. One notable example is the usage of transformer models to predict quality in drug manufacturing. I am planning to embed Generative AI in many processes to drive efficiency. To create higher value for our clients, I am also leading several initiatives that include ML on patient prediction, physician targeting and next best action.  

How do you foster a culture of innovation within your technology teams?

My past and current experience has been leading teams of data scientists, data engineers, ML-Operations engineers, platform administrators, and software engineers so I will talk about fostering a culture of innovation in this context.  

1. Encourage curiosity within any role. Ask open-ended questions that gets people to realize that they have agency in solving their problems.  

2. Lead from the front. This has served me well because I love to learn and write code. There is such beauty in Python! I feel that people respect a technical leader who is eager to walk in their shoes and learn from them. Besides, coding is such fun with AI enabled coding assistants.  

3. Encourage a plurality of opinions and invite criticism. Both help to create trust and a safe space for innovation.  

Continue reading here

DECODER
What is a HIPAA Audit Trail?

A HIPAA audit trail is a record that tracks access to protected health information (PHI), documenting who accessed it, when, and what actions were taken. It ensures compliance, aids in security, and provides accountability by detailing all interactions with PHI.

For a healthcare organization, HIPAA audit trails and logs can:

1. Record details such as timestamps, username, and which patient data is accessed.

2. Capture login, logout, and access to ePHI.

3. Alert admins in case of security violations or unauthorized access.

4. To demonstrate the organization’s compliance with HIPAA during audits.

Read in detail about HIPAA audit trails and logs here.