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CIO
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HEALTH
IT
Data breach at Oklahoma
hospital affects 92,000
patients' medical records
By Naomi Diaz
D
uncan (Okla.) Regional Hospital notified patients
March 4 about a data security incident that ex-
posed 92,000 patients' medical records.
According to the Maine Attorney General's Office, which
posts all security incidents involving Maine residents,
the hospital discovered the incident Jan. 20 when some
of the hospital's internal systems became inaccessible.
It is unclear whether the incident involved ransomware
or data exfiltration.
Upon discovering the incident, the hospital disconnect-
ed all systems from external access and implemented
incident response protocols.
The affected patient information includes names, ad-
dresses, demographic information, dates of birth and
some combination of Social Security numbers, med-
ical records and treatment information, according to
Duncan Regional Hospital.
Hospital officials said they will offer credit monitoring
and identity theft services to those affected. n
5 EHR contracts, go-lives
By Katie Adams
B
elow are five organizations that announced plans
to implement an EHR or deployed a new EHR from
January to mid-March.
1. The Defense Department launched a new Cerner EHR sys-
tem across 100 healthcare facilities in Texas.
2. Morgantown, W.Va.-based WVU Medicine gave the Mari-
on County Health Department access to its Epic EHR system
with the goal of improving care coordination.
3. Bar Harbor, Maine-based Mount Desert Island Hospital's
new Cerner EHR went live in March.
4. Coeur d'Alene, Idaho-based Kootenai Health went live
with a new Epic EHR.
5. Emporia, Kan.-based Newman Regional Health will extend
its Meditech EHR to Burlington, Kan.-based Coffey Health
System, a nearby critical access hospital. n
Former Anthem executive
joins virtual care company
By Georgina Gonzalez
L
iz Kwo, MD, has joined virtual care company Everly
Health as its new chief medical officer.
Dr. Kwo was most recently the deputy chief clinical
officer at Anthem, according to a March 28 news release.
She is also a practicing physician of urgent and occupa-
tional medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance and is an
angel investor across health IT and tech.
Everly Health is a virtual and diagnostics-driven care
platform with a network of hundreds of providers.
"I am energized by Everly Health's commitment to af-
fordable and accessible care." Dr. Kwo said in a news
release. "I believe we can do incredible things to change
the future of diagnostics and virtual care." n
Hospitals lag in cloud
adoption: 4 things to know
By Georgina Gonzalez
A
survey accessed in March revealed that hospitals lag
behind other industries when it comes to cloud adop-
tion, especially when it comes to multicloud adoption.
Although multicloud infrastructure is one dominant form
used in IT, around 30 percent of healthcare professionals sur-
veyed said private clouds form their most common IT mod-
el. The cloud computing company Nutanix completed the
research, surveying 1,700 health IT professionals between
August 2021 and September 2021. Here is what they found:
1. Globally, around 36 percent of companies in all indus-
tries are deploying multicloud IT infrastructures, yet only
27 percent of healthcare organizations are. One-quarter of
healthcare respondents said they use traditional or legacy
infrastructure only.
2. All respondents said that their health organizations have
moved one or more of their applications into a new environ-
ment in the last year, and 80 percent of them said moving them
to a new cloud environment is costly and time-consuming.
3. Security was the most cited reason for moving to a
cloud environment.
4. Looking to the future, the most important priorities for
health IT teams were cited as adopting 5G (47 percent) and
artificial intelligence-based services (46 percent), improving
business recovery (45 percent), and multicloud manage-
ment (44 percent). n
