Becker's Hospital Review

82 CIO / HEALTH IT What Cerner's CEO envisions for EHRs 10 years from now By Katie Adams H ealthcare would benefit from more exploration of the vast amounts of EHR data available to clinicians and researchers, Cerner CEO David Feinberg, MD, wrote in a March 7 company blog post. Dr. Feinberg said EHRs should play a bigger role in how we learn about and address health equity issues, noting that 80 percent of health outcomes stem from social and structural determinants of health — not our DNA. He said a decade from now he hopes the EHR is viewed as a source of data that clinicians and patients can use to uncover ways in which care can be im- proved, leading to more proactivity and cost-effectiveness in healthcare. rough Cerner's Learning Health Net- work, an effort to foster EHR-based health research, hospitals can access studies that highlight shortcomings in outpatient care, home care resources and community programming, accord- ing to the post. Dr. Feinberg pointed out a study from Orange, Calif.-based Children's Hospital of Orange County in which researchers used Cerner data to find patients with a history of malnutrition were more like- ly to contract severe COVID-19. Based on the results of the study, the hospital highlighted the need for consistent nu- tritional care access when treating cer- tain patient populations. "We're headed toward the next genera- tion of healthcare," Dr. Feinberg wrote. "Reduced costs. Accessible health in- sights. A stronger foundation for doctors, nurses and families to be able to access and act on data to care for themselves." n FBI, CISA warn of Russian exploitation of multifactor authentication, PrintNightmare vulnerability By Andrew Cass T he FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint advisory March 15 that Russian state-sponsored cyber actors gained net- work access through exploitation of default multifactor authentication pro- tocols and a known vulnerability in Windows Print Spooler. The cyber actors took advantage of a misconfigured account set to default mul- tifactor authentication protocols at a nongovernmental organization as early as May 2021. This allowed them to enroll a new device for multifactor authentication and access the victim's network. They then exploited the PrintNightmare critical vulnerability. This allowed them to run arbitrary code with system privileges and access cloud and email accounts for document exfiltration. The joint advisory includes indicators of compromise and mitigations. It also includes network, remote work, security and user awareness best practices. Recommended mitigations include: 1. Enforcing multifactor authentication and reviewing configuration policies to protect against "fail open" and re-enrollment scenarios. 2. Ensuring inactive accounts are disabled uniformly across the active directory and multifactor authentication systems. 3. Patch all systems and prioritize patching for known exploited vulnerabilities. n Intermountain 1st organization to earn triple stage 7 under new HIMSS model By Katie Adams S alt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare on March 14 became the first organization in the world to achieve triple stage 7 under the Healthcare Infor- mation and Management Systems Society's new requirements. HIMSS is a nonprofit organization that grades healthcare organizations on how they use EMR data to improve patient outcomes. In January, HIMSS updated its flagship maturity model for EMR adoption to "reflect the priorities of today's health systems toward measuring clinical outcomes, patient engagement and use of digital technologies and EMRs to support excellence in patient care." The updated model employs a more outcome-driven approach to measurement and strategy, according to HIMSS. Its scoring range still runs from stage 0 to 7. "These ratings are a good way to take a look under the hood to make sure ev- erything is running as well as we think it is," Farukh Usmani, MD, Intermountain's medical director of care transformation, said in a news release. "We don't avoid our annual physical just because we feel good; sometimes it's beneficial to get a good exam done, to be reviewed by an outside source. The HIMSS validation is a good EMR utilization check from the leader in the industry." n

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