Becker's Hospital Review

55 CIO / HEALTH IT 270,000 Health Alliance Plan, Michigan Blue Cross customers alerted of vendor data breach By Mackenzie Garrity H ealth Alliance Plan and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan alert- ed nearly 270,000 members combined that their personal infor- mation may have been compromised after a data breach at the payers' mailing service vendor, according to the Detroit Free Press. On Nov. 28, Wolverine Solutions Group, the mailing service vendor, noti- fied HAP of a Sept. 23 ransomware attack that left the vendor locked out of its servers and workstations. The ransomware attack may have exposed customers' names, address- es, dates of birth, member identification numbers, healthcare provider names, patient identification numbers and claim information. HAP verified the extent of the attack in February and notified 120,344 customers of the breach. BCBS of Michigan customers were informed in December that their in- formation also may have been compromised, Wolverine Solutions Presi- dent Darryl English said. The Blue Cross malware attack affected 150,000 members, all but 50,000 of them from Michigan. Since the attack, there has been no evidence that customers' personal information has been misused, Blue Cross said. Wolverine Solutions' ongoing investigation determined the affected re- cords were encrypted. The company is sending its customers personal- ized letters describing the extent of the breach, as some may have had Social Security numbers and medical records affected. n Cleveland Clinic launches clinical AI center: 4 things to know By Jackie Drees C leveland Clinic formed the Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence to propel use of the technology in healthcare areas including diagnostics, disease pre- diction and treatment planning. Four things to know: 1. Launched by Cleveland Clinic Enterprise Analytics, the center will create a collaborative platform be- tween physicians, researchers and data scientists to provide technol- ogy support for Cleveland Clinic's AI initiatives. 2. The center will conduct research in various areas of medicine, in- cluding pathology, genetics and cancer, to solve clinical issues us- ing machine learning and other AI technologies. 3. Cleveland Clinic hematologist and oncologist Aziz Nazha, MD, will serve as director of the new center and as the system's associ- ate medical director for AI. 4. The center has already begun working on new projects, including building machine learning models to identify patients with a high risk of death during admission, as well as numerous cancer-focused proj- ects to make personalized predic- tions of patient outcomes. n 5% of hospital IT budgets go to cybersecurity, despite 82% of hospitals reporting breaches By Mackenzie Garrity A s the gatekeeper of Social Security num- bers, medical information and health in- surance data, hospital are big targets for hackers. But healthcare providers only spent about 5 percent of their IT budgets on security last year according to a survey by global research and advi- sory company Gartner. e healthcare sector fell behind banking and fi- nancial services, which spent 7.3 percent of their IT budgets on cybersecurity, as well as retail and wholesale services, which spent 6.1 percent, e Chicago Tribune reported. Security threats are nothing new. Hospitals have been victims of ransomware and phishing attacks for decades because they are the "holy grail of per- sonal data," Mark Greisinger, president of NetDili- gence, a cybersecurity management company, told the Tribune. About 82 percent of hospital IT security leaders re- ported a "significant security incident" in the last 12 months, a 2019 Health Information of Management Systems Society cybersecurity survey revealed. Of those who reported security incidents, 20 per- cent blamed them on vendors, consultants or oth- er parties. More than half said the incidents were malicious. But when choosing between patient care or cyber- security for where to spend limited resources, many hospitals select the former. "ere are so many other things healthcare systems need and people are begging you for and yelling for," Doug Brown, president of Black Book Re- search, a market research company, told the publi- cation. "ey're not really putting the attention on cybersecurity because it's a really boring issue." However, healthcare providers are beginning to come around to the importance of cybersecurity. About 38 percent of healthcare organizations increased their cy- bersecurity spending from 2017 to 2018, according to the HIMSS cybersecurity survey. n

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