What Is The Health Industry’s Biggest Concern In 2018?

Health industry actors in New York and nationally face a number of stressing concerns as they go about their important work each day.

And their thoughts are understandably focused squarely on patients while they perform their duties. “Patient safety is on everyone’s mind,” duly notes a principal with the ECRI Institute, a national nonprofit group that seeks to closely wed scientific research with improved medical outcomes.

ECRI annually publishes a much-gleaned “Top 10” list of pressing matters that confront medical facilities in the United States. The compilation foremost stresses “hazards” to the industry relevant to technology.

Candidly, those are not in short supply. The ECRI commentator above states that, with hospitals, doctors, specialty technicians and other professionals routinely addressing patient needs and concerns, a due focus on technology safety “sometimes gets left behind.”

That is a problem of high magnitude, say researchers, given the sheer downsides resulting when a technological problem — owing to negligence or bad-faith behavior by third parties — intrudes on facility operations.

The biggest concern of all, states ECRI’s “Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2018,” is cyber warfare that purposefully targets hospitals and clinics. Regular readers of this blog note well that so-called “ransomware” marked by criminals’ infiltration of proprietary and confidential facility systems is a serious — indeed, a deadly — problem. Cyber thieves can freeze data, interrupt key operations, demand money from administrators and, most importantly, imperil patients’ lives.

Medical principals cannot afford to underestimate that threat, which ECRI states transcends a mere “IT nightmare” to embrace “potential patient safety crises.”

External threats to industry participants these days are multi-sourced and incessant. Questions or concerns regarding facility-posed hazards and related issues can be directed to a proven health care law firm that routinely promotes the interests of diverse medical actors in matters concerning risk and liability.