vulnerabilities news from FierceHealthIT

A new audit has concluded that New Jersey has not put adequate security measures in place to protect sensitive Medicaid program data. The review, conducted by the New Jersey Office of the State Read more...

Your clinical data may be more vulnerable than you think. According to a new study, many healthcare providers aren't meeting the grade when it comes to protecting their EMRs. What's more, they noted, Read more...

> Google Health seems to be on the verge of launching, with execs soliciting feedback on how the service should look when it rolls out. Blog

> Another resignation from the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel board of directors, this time by one its two consumer representatives. Alison Rein has previously criticized how the federal government handles privacy issues. …

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At the RSA 2007 conference this week, Bill Gates stood up to pitch smart cards as the solution to many of the IT industry's current security issues. Gates suggested that transitioning from weak passwords to smart cards would go a long way toward making distributed computing a reality. "Passwords are not only weak, [they] have a huge problem in that if you get more and more of them, the worse it is...so we have to evolve from them," Gates told the conference during his keynote. When …

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> CMS has given the state of Kentucky a $4.9 million grant to build a portal making patient information accessible to doctors. Article

> A new standard is emerging for piping laboratory information system results to EMRs. Article

> If you don't have a strong mobile security policy in place--one …

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For three days, the hospital network's firewalls fell apart and its network slowed to a crawl. It was an agonizing stretch for "Cam Smith" (the anonymous IT engineer featured by CSO magazine), whose network was down about 90 percent of the time during the painful episode, despite the best efforts of the IT department and vendor engineers. Smith and his colleagues were stumped at first, particularly given that none of them were assigned full-time to security issues, but after …

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Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is either the most amazing thing to grace healthcare in decades or a civil liberties nightmare waiting to explode. Kinda depends on who you ask. RFID fans will cheer a report from hospitals showing how they are cutting down on equipment theft using the technology that allows for "track and trace" of anything from a bottle of pills to a giant medical device. And RFID has already made it inside, so to speak, the human body. Florida-based …

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