Risk in Healthcare Information Technology: Creating a Standardized Risk Assessment Framework

Data breaches are occurring at an unprecedented rate. Between June 2019 and early October 2020, over 564 data breaches affected over 36.6 million patients as posted to the United States Federal government HITECH portal. These patients are at risk for having their identities stolen or sold on alternative marketplaces. Some healthcare entities are working to manage privacy and security risks to their operations, research, and patients. However, many have some procedures and policies in place, with few (if any) centrally managing all their infrastructure risks. For example, many healthcare organizations are not tracking or updating all the known and potential concerns and elements into a centralized repository following industry best practice timetables for auditing and insurance quantification. This chapter examines known and potential problems in healthcare information technology and discusses a new open source risk management standardized framework library to improve the coordination and communication of the aforementioned problematic management components. The healthcare industry would benefit from adopting such a standardized risk-centric framework.

An Integrated Social and Behavioral System Approach to Evaluation of Healthcare Information Technology for Polychronic Conditions

Healthcare delivery systems are evolving with the advances in health information technology (HIT) development and its applications to coordinated or guided care for polychronic conditions. The design features of artificial intelligence in healthcare reflect the public interest in optimizing care coordination and communication between providers and patients. This article offers a practical evaluation and assessment of the relevance of theoretical frameworks and appropriate methodologies to formalize a multi-criteria optimization of a logic model applicable for achieving the system’s efficiency and effectiveness. In specifying theoretical constructs and evaluation methods for HIT evaluation, a three-fold purpose is to show the relevance of personal and behavioral determinants of HIT use, articulate the need for developing a transdisciplinary framework, and formulate appropriate multilevel modeling and causal analysis of the determinants of HIT use and its impacts on chronic care.

Healthcare workers' communicative constitution of health information technology (HIT) resilience

PurposeAlthough resilience is heavily studied in both the healthcare and organizational change literatures, it has received less attention in healthcare information technology (HIT) implementation research. Healthcare organizations are consistently in the process of implementing and updating several complex technologies. Implementations and updates are challenged because healthcare workers often struggle to perceive the benefits of HITs and experience deficiencies in system design, yet bear the brunt of the blame for implementation failures. This combination implores healthcare workers to exercise HIT resilience; however, how they talk about this construct has been left unexplored. Subsequently, this study explores healthcare workers' communicative constitution of HIT resilience.Design/methodology/approachTwenty-three physicians (N = 23), specializing in oncology, pediatrics or anesthesiology, were recruited from one healthcare organization to participate in comprehensive interviews during and after the implementation of an updated HIT system DIPS.FindingsThematic analysis findings reveal physicians communicatively constituted HIT resilience as their (1) convictions in the continued, positive developments of newer HIT iterations, which marked their current adaptive HIT behaviors as temporary, and (2) contributions to inter-organizational HIT brainstorming projects in which HIT designers, IT staff and clinicians jointly problem-solved current HIT inadequacies and created new HIT features.Originality/valueOffering both practical for healthcare leaders and managers and theoretical implications for HIT and resilience scholars, this study's results suggest that (1) healthcare leaders must work diligently to create a culture of collaborative HIT design in their organization to help facilitate the success of new HIT use, and (2) information technology scholars reevaluate the theoretical meaningfulness a technology's spirit and reconsider the causal nature of a technology's embedded structures.

Bridging Policy and Service Performance of Hospital-Based Nutrition Support by Healthcare Information Technology

Although the healthcare policy was implemented to incentivize the multidisciplinary services of hospital-based nutrition support team (NST) in South Korea, timely completion of the services has been challenging in the hospitals. We enhanced NST healthcare information technology (NST−HIT) to bridge the gap between policy implementation and seamless execution of the policy in the hospital system. A 48 month pre-test−post-test study was performed, including a 12 month pre-intervention period, a six month intervention period, and a 30 month post-intervention period. The enhanced NST−HIT provided sufficient patient data and streamlined communication processes among end-users. A Student’s t-test showed that the timely completion rate of NST consultations, the reimbursement rate of NST consultations, average response times of NST physicians and nurses, and length of hospital stay significantly improved during the post-intervention period. A segmented regression analysis of interrupted time series showed that the average response times of NST physicians had sustained after the interventions. We believe that well-structured, multi-pronged initiatives with leadership support from the hospital improved service performance of hospital NST in response to national-level healthcare policy changes.

The Short-Term Impact of COVID-19 on Global Stock Market Indices

The COVID-19 pandemic, declared on March 11, 2020 by the World Health Organisation (WHO), has had a severe economic and financial impact on every economy around the world. This paper aims to analyze the short-term impact of COVID-19 on global financial stock market indices. We study the impact of six different WHO announcements regarding COVID-19 on five different sectors (Pharma, Healthcare, Information Technology, Hotel & Airline) based on the indices of three different economies (World, Developed and Emerging economy). We also study the movement of stock prices and volume of nine different global stock market indices (classified as developed & emerging) based on the number of new cases and deaths due to COVID-19. The study’s findings suggest that there is a significant effect of COVID-19 on global financial stock markets. However, the effect is varied for developed and emerging economies.