Is it possible that North Korea used a stolen National Security Agency hacking tool to infect medical devices at U.S. hospitals? Turns out, in today's topsy-turvy world, it is. When the NSA cyber weapon-powered WannaCry ransomware spread across the world this past weekend, it infected as many as 200,000 Windows systems, including those at 48 hospital trusts in the U.K. and so-far unnamed medical facilities in the U.S. too. It wasn't just administrative PCs that were hacked, though. Medical devices themselves were affected too, Forbes has learned...

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The 1960s was a decade that witnessed humans setting foot on the moon and a bloody war that changed the history. In between these events, a drug that would be the mainstay for doctors for decades to fight a smart bug, was born. Rifampicin was the last novel class of antibiotics against Mycobacterium tuberculosis till the arrival of bedaquiline at the fag end of 2012. Discovered in 1965, Rifampicin was marketed in Italy in 1968 and was approved by the US regulatory body in 1971...

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The rise of electronic health records with natural language processing technology is transforming provider workflow and clinical documentation. Though NLP is not without its challenges, it can offer valuable benefits when used wisely, said Anupam Goel, vice president of clinical information at Chicago-based Advocate Health Care...

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The recent WannaCry ransomware attack that infiltrated more than 150 countries and forced some European healthcare organizations to suspend certain services reportedly infected certain medical devices as well. HITRUST explained in an email update that its investigations found that MedRad (Bayer), Siemens, and other unnamed medical devices were infected. Furthermore, Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) “were identified within the HITRUST Enhanced IOC program well in advance of last Friday’s attacks,” the organization stated...

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Change Healthcare has signed on with the Linux Foundation's blockchain-focused Hyperledger initiative, the first healthcare organization to join the industry group at the premier level. Other premier members of Hyperledger, which aims to advance blockchain technology across all industries, include Accenture, IBM, Intel and SAP. General members include Kaiser Permanente, NTT Data, VMware and more...

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With the recent development in software technology, many application systems are now competing for medical attention. Healthcare (or what we can call it as medical software) is evolving rapidly through communications, record-keeping system to a source of decision support, consequently, playing an active role in clinical service. However, unlike many other services, medical software is not very well regulated and places like a safety burden and cost of ineffective use solely depend on the physicians...

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Over the last 25 years, China, Ethiopia, the Maldive Islands, Peru, South Korea and Turkey had the greatest improvements in “deaths avoidable through health care at their economic level,” a complex but intriguing new measure of global mortality described last week in the Lancet. By that standard, the United States improved slightly over the same period, 1990 to 2015. But the American ranking is still so low that it’s “an embarrassment, especially considering the U.S. spends $9,000 per person on health care annually,” said the report’s chief author, Dr. Christopher J. L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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While blockchain may have cut its teeth on the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the distributed electronic ledger technology is quickly making inroads across a variety of industries. That's mainly because of its innate security and its potential for improving systems  operations all while reducing costs and creating new revenue streams. This year, blockchain technology is expected to become a key business focus for many industries, according to a Deloitte survey conducted late last year...

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Americans grumble all the time about the quality of our health-care system, but when we're dealing with serious issues, such as injuries from an auto accident or cancer, we often count our blessings that we live in a wealthy country that has well-trained doctors with access to the latest medical technology. Yet those factors don't always correlate with staying alive. That's the distressing finding from a global study of what researchers call “amenable mortality,” or deaths that theoretically could have been avoided by timely and effective medical care...

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