Becker's Hospital Review

34 CIO / HEALTH IT New York hospital unable to access some patient data after ransomware attack By Mackenzie Garrity N ew York City-based Brooklyn Hospital Center notified an undisclosed number of patients about a cybersecu- rity incident that may have exposed their information. In July, Brooklyn Hospital Center discovered unusual activity within its servers. Upon investigation, the hospital determined Sept. 4 that malware had encrypted certain systems, disrupt- ing operations. While there is no evidence that patient data was accessed or acquired, Brooklyn Hospital Center has been unable to recover the data infected with malware. Patient data that may have been exposed included names and certain dental or cardiac images. Brooklyn Hospital Center rec- ommends patients monitor account statements. "The privacy and security of information in our possession is one of the hospital's highest priorities and, accordingly, we have strict security measures in place to protect information in our care. Upon learning of this incident, we quickly took steps to restore our systems and ensure the security of our network. Further, we are reviewing our policies and procedures relating to data security and taking steps to enhance our existing secu- rity protocols," the hospital said in a statement. n 20,000 patients may have been affected by data breach at Utah medical center By Mackenzie Garrity P rovo-based Utah Valley Eye Center confirmed that the demographic information of more than 20,000 patients may have been exposed in a cybersecurity incident in 2018, according to the Daily Herald. In June 2018, Utah Valley Eye Center's business por- tal was hacked. The unauthorized third party sent an email to 5,764 patients posing as a notification from PayPal. In the email, hackers told patients they had received a payment. Upon discovering the malicious email and that its system had been hacked, Utah Valley Eye Center promptly sent emails to the 5,764 patients. Utah Valley Eye Center said it believes only emails were accessed. However, patient names, addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers could have also been exposed. No protected health information or financial informa- tion was exposed, Utah Valley Health Center confirmed, according to the Daily Herald. Since the incident, the clinic has updated its internal policies and procedures. "At Utah Valley Eye Center, we are committed to pro- viding [patients] with top-notch healthcare services, in- cluding the protection of your health information," the center said in a statement, the Daily Herald reported. n UT Health, Cardinal Health, Amazon Web Services partner on AI medical research By Jackie Drees U niversity of Texas Health Science Cen- ter at Houston, Cardinal Health and Amazon Web Services partnered with Virtusa, an IT and digital health solutions provider, to use artificial intelligence tech- niques in medical research. e organizations' collaborative research project aims to find the best treatment and management strategies for subarachnoid hemorrhage and diabetes based on healthcare data and computer simulations. Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health and Virtusa will use the company's cloud-based data management platform to simulate a comprehensive dataset comprising EHRs representative of more than 30,000 patients. With the dataset, researchers hope to iden- tify hidden trends that can help support new treatment plans and cures for a vari- ety of illnesses. Virtusa's cloud platform is available through AWS' marketplace for third-party developers. "e EHR data simulated by Virtusa's plat- form will help us test and validate our new predictive models and machine learning algo- rithms before applying to the real EHR data," said Hulin Wu, PhD, chair of UT Health's bio- medical informatics department, according to a the news release. UT Health will use the simulated dataset to train and evaluate AI and machine learning models capable of predicting treatment out- comes for specific illnesses. n

• Cover