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As healthcare continues a shift toward value-based services, providers are recognizing a need to adopt more flexible and effective technologies to support this transition. It is a movement that is quickly gaining speed thanks to government incentives handed down that relate to improving interoperability and patient access. Both of those government-driven healthcare initiatives include an added focus on EHR security.
In response to the change in technology, many hospitals have already turned to hosted EHR cloud solutions to improve patient data access and streamline the flow of information.
In natural disasters, rural communities and their supporting hospitals face a unique set of challenges in maintaining communications and coordinating care.
To overcome remote locations and outdated infrastructure, rural providers should consider EHR hosting to secure operations and enhance data integrity.
Hospitals are the backbone of rural communities, and these providers need confidence in their EHR's ability to support clinicians during a crisis.
For one of our partner hospitals, Mille Lacs Health System (MLHS), an out-of-the-way locale meant that, before working with MEDHOST, the integrity of their servers had to rely on contracted support.
“We were living on a razor-thin line,” said Mike Benda, MLHS IT Director. “It’s hard to get IT staff in a remote place like this. We had this contractor go through our backups daily and make sure the files were synced. He’d go on vacation, and that was it: there was no backup resource for the contractor. It’s one of those things that gnaws at you because you’re just waiting for a boot to drop.”
Although the concept of multi-tenancy, which involves moving data offsite, seemed like a potential solution, bandwidth limitations and a lack of control made Mike hesitant. However, his perspective shifted after being given the opportunity to personally tour MEDHOST's data center and review the robust security measures and backup protocols implemented to safeguard critical information. Impressed by what he saw, Mike made the decision to partner with MEDHOST.
“Multi-tenancy solutions helped us raise service levels and guarantee greater IT budget certainty,” he concluded.
Mike's experience highlights the transformative potential of EHR hosting for rural hospitals. These collaborations hold the promise of significantly enhancing patient data integrity and improving overall operations for facilities across the country.
Read the rest of Mike’s story here.
Outsourcing EHR hosting adds an extra layer of disaster protection that local vendors and outmoded systems simply can’t provide.
An EHR host not only saves resources and lowers risk but also provides clear answers to important questions:
A hosted EHR solution offers added protection and sustainability for critical patient data systems. By entrusting EHR disaster response and recovery to an EHR host, rural healthcare providers can better care for those impacted by natural disasters.
MEDHOST Direct is a complete cloud platform solution that can help you with day-to-day technology management while elevating your health IT delivery and HIPAA security capabilities.
Learn more about how MEDHOST Direct can help and support your hospital’s critical IT needs during a disaster. Contact us today at 1.800.383.6278 or email inquiries@medhost.com.
Mille Lacs Health System (MLHS), a community-owned, not-for-profit healthcare organization, is situated approximately 80 miles north of the Twin Cities in central Minnesota. It serves a predominately rural population within Mille Lacs and surrounding counties, as well as residents of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.
The hospital is currently undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion, including better inpatient rooms, a new emergency department, kitchen, cafeteria, lobby, same-day surgery, lab, sleep center, and more.
By integrating HIT systems through a collaborative partnership with MEDHOST, MLHS has consistently provided exceptional care to the people of Mille Lacs County and the surrounding area, despite undergoing rapid change.
When disaster strikes, the first thing many of us do is drop our day-to-day routine.
Finding a safe place to stay with our families, repairing homes or businesses, and caring for loved ones becomes our new full-time job. The community pulls together and takes stock of what’s important, stories emerge of courage and resilience—we find hope.
Healthcare professionals often face a different reality. Even though their homes, families, and friends may have been impacted in much the same way, they have an obligation to set aside personal concerns, treat the injured, and maintain healthcare infrastructure at a time when it’s needed most. Even if that means driving through the pitch-black darkness of a power outage or maneuvering around streets inundated with floodwaters.
The last thing hospital staff need to worry about at a time like this is the burden of electronic health record (EHR) disaster response and recovery. In this post, we’ll outline three ways a cloud-based EHR host can ensure that clinicians and staff have uninterrupted access to the tools they need at the bedside during any natural disaster.
EHR technology architecture must be elastic enough to provide highly targeted resources while also satisfying a wide range of demands. With the following features, an EHR can endure most calamities and add necessary functionality to a hospital's emergency operations:
Choosing a hosted solution is one of the best methods for many healthcare facilities to ensure continued EHR performance as part of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Hosted systems often include backups at regular intervals, which can assist in reducing data loss and accelerating recovery time.
Hospitals in disaster-prone locations may also wish to consider an electronic health record systems host with multiple points of connection or data centers. Healthcare organizations that can failover to a separate, undamaged data center may have fewer disruptions or shorter downtimes in the event of catastrophic, on-site hardware failure.
As part of a disaster medical assistance team, the technical manager keeps in constant contact with a hospital, ensuring all managed IT systems meet that hospital’s needs and expectations. As top-tier support, technical managers must be aware of every issue impacting a hospital. They are also responsible for keeping hospitals informed on all required system updates.
General EHR support personnel can act as an extension of the hospital’s internal IT team. Aside from addressing and fixing common EHR difficulties, support employees may also assist a hospital in anticipating important service outages.
For instance, MEDHOST customer support resources continually monitor harmful weather occurrences around the country. If a hospital is in a high-risk location, customer service can help them implement parts of their EHR disaster plan and coordinate priorities with technical management.
Through MEDHOST Direct, your data is safe. With minimal downtime and daily flash copies with secondary site data replication services for healthcare facilities, our HIPAA-compliant backups provide reliable security for your critical data in the event of any disaster mother nature can throw your way.
We have decades of experience championing patient safety in the eye of natural disasters. To learn more about how MEDHOST can be a dedicated part of your contingency planning, call us at 1.800.383.6278 or email inquiries@medhost.com.
While the hybrid model has given us the freedom to choose whether we complete our work at home or off-site, anywhere access to enterprise systems has also made it harder than ever to protect sensitive data.
Recently, data architecture has emerged as a popular vector for attack. Malicious actors can take advantage of internet-facing servers that require a username and password by creating a clone of the server login page and tricking users into entering their credentials.
In this blog, we’ll outline how multi-factor authentication (MFA) can protect these systems as well as best practices that healthcare organizations can adopt to prevent criminals from using digital resources to compromise security.
MFA is an electronic verification method that uses two or more pieces of evidence (factors) to authenticate a user. These factors can include something only the user might know, a device only the user owns, or some other quality inherent to the authorized party. These measures work together to ensure that a single piece of information, such as a password, can’t be used to access protected data.
Threat actors can infiltrate servers through a sophisticated process that involves cloning a login page, using phishing emails to lure employees into visiting the cloned page, then stealing their credentials. If the target’s website is a single-factor access point, the hacker now has everything they need to gain control.
First, the attacker will compromise an unrelated website. The intent is to use this website as a staging ground. The attacker will allow the original website to operate as normal, and this server will be used later to capture credentials from the real target. We will now refer to this as the threat actor’s compromised website.
Next, the threat actor will identify its real target—in this instance, a hospital or health system. This target will have an Internet-facing server with username and password authentication. The threat actor will then clone the authentication page to the compromised website as an additional URL.
Finally, the threat actor will create a phishing campaign to target the real victim. All the attacker needs is one user to enter their login information on the fake web page.
Companies must strongly consider what websites they allow to be externally facing. These public pages can be found by a search engine, which presents criminals with the opportunity to create clones that might fool unwitting users into giving up their login credentials.
For instance, we sometimes find a client has made their clinical software available on the internet. Usually, a physician has requested this for ease of use outside the facility.
Keep in mind: If content appears to have value, it will be targeted. For this reason, we strongly discourage attaching clinical software directly to the internet. Given the sensitivity of the data and the consequences of a breach in both regulatory fines and patient trust, we advise clients house this software behind a remote gateway. In creating this security apparatus, MFA is a must.
Furthermore, clients should have an asset inventory of what services and protocols are internet-facing. Website content should be analyzed for how much information is being exposed to an attacker. For example, the word “clinical” in the URL will get unwanted attention. A process should be established to approve all new websites prior to being enabled.
MEDHOST Information Security Services can provide the expertise to help identify these and other threats to your organization. We can provide a comprehensive security review that includes identifying vulnerabilities, prioritization, remediation strategies, and preemptive measures to help manage risk and improve security and safety.
To learn more about how MEDHOST can help protect its customers from cyber threats and reduce their impact on operations, please reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
MEDHOST first engaged with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2013 to facilitate a cloud-based patient portal. Since then, we have expanded this collaboration to include the development of better interoperability solutions, enhanced clinical capabilities, and access to meaningful analytics.
As part of the AWS Partner Network (APN), this ongoing dialogue provides us with the necessary tools to create and deploy new products while enhancing existing customer solutions. In this post, we discuss our history with AWS, current initiatives, and projects still on the horizon.
As a leader in the Healthcare IT (HIT) space, our mission is to help providers achieve interoperability, or the secure and easy exchange of electronic health information (EHI).
Seeking to protect and define interoperability, congress signed the 21st Century Cures Act into law on December 13, 2016. The Cures Act established an actionable legal framework that required hospitals to give patients and their providers secure access to all healthcare information stored in electronic health records (EHR) and other health information technology (HIT) systems.
More importantly, the Cures Act prohibited all practices that interfere with collecting, sharing, and using EHI within an appropriate care setting, commonly known as health information blocking.
As part of the Cures Act, compliant EHRs were also required to provide data through application programming interfaces (API), allowing programmers to use third-party resources to create interoperability software geared toward providers and patients.
Moreover, APIs must comply with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards for exchanging healthcare information. FHIR API interface standards ensure that patients own their data and can access it in real-time. While this benefits the patient directly, it also allows providers to adopt emergent technologies, such as mobile applications, that increase ease of use.
Using AWS FHIR Works, Amazon’s open-source programming toolkit for creating multi-tenant, interoperability solutions, we worked with AWS to build an API platform that could be universally implemented at our partner hospitals.
Multitenancy is a software architecture that allows a program to run on a single server, accessible by many clients. For MEDHOST customers, many of which operate in remote or rural settings, independently setting up and managing an FHIR server is a daunting challenge. By offloading FHIR API to our servers, these customers can simplify compliance, enhance security, and minimize disruptions.
The MEDHOST Cures 2023 Interoperability Solution incorporates all the functionality mentioned above into a single, comprehensive deliverable. This solution creates a framework for the seamless and secure access, exchange, and use of electronic health information for healthcare systems of any size, anywhere.
As part of MEDHOST’s commitment to providing industry-leading, affordable technology to rural and community hospitals, we conduct regular advisory group sessions that help facilitate a dialogue between our engineers and customers. These sessions allow us to understand the unique challenges these facilities face and better catalog their workflows and processes.
Developed in collaboration with AWS, and with insights gleaned from our customers, we created MEDHOST Mobility Physician, a mobile solution that empowers providers by putting EHR insights in the palm of their hand.
Instant messaging was a particularly exciting capability that stemmed from these sessions. Through Amazon Chime SDK, which facilitates real-time communications for web or mobile applications, providers can place orders and receive critical notifications within the MEDHOST Mobility Physician app.
In the future, we plan to augment this solution with machine learning-powered data visualizations and intelligent tools that allow physicians to better predict patient outcomes.
When MEDHOST first began working with AWS to enable Cures Act compliance, it became apparent that artificial intelligence could be leveraged to extract advanced analytics, opening the door to better insights from secure clinical data, such as vitals, diagnoses, medications and procedures.
After collaborating with the AWS Data Lab team, our engineers quickly identified the importance of data lake, and built a platform to deliver analytics to hospitals as software as service (SaaS).
Data available in the cloud can provide radical solutions for some of clinicians’ most pressing concerns, like predicting the onset of sepsis and cardiac risk.
In addition, by utilizing the AWS QuickSight business intelligence tool, MEDHOST YourCare Analytics brings these advanced insights to the hospital back office, making it easy to target and track the most critical data related to effective contract management, projections, postings, denials, and overall business growth.
To learn more about how MEDHOST’s AWS-powered solutions can benefit your hospital, please reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
The regulatory views and assessments contained within this post are solely those of MEDHOST.
Rural America is home to more than 60 million people, many of whom lack easy access to healthcare and tend to be at a higher risk for poor health outcomes than those living in more concentrated areas.
While rural providers work tirelessly to address health disparities among these underserved communities, they face an uphill battle. Outdated transportation infrastructure and labor shortages are compounded by dwindling revenue, while social factors such as rising death rates, widespread opioid misuse, and a high proportion of uninsured patients strain already overburdened resources.
This is a battle that community and critical access facilities are losing. Since January 2013, nearly 100 rural hospitals have been forced to close their doors forever.
In this blog, we’ll cover the current healthcare landscape as seen through the lens of a rural healthcare provider and touch on key strategies that hospitals can adopt, right now, to continue providing for the friends, family, and neighbors that make up the communities they serve.
New market-driven strategies supported by technological advances will be necessary for the long-term sustainability of rural hospitals.
In order to keep their doors open, these facilities must start focusing on the following strategies for continued success:
Customer relationship management (CRM), social media, online portals, and mobile applications, which are more targeted and economical than conventional advertising or community outreach, will increasingly be the driving forces behind the growth initiatives of rural providers.
Due to the higher likelihood of Medicare or Medicaid coverage for rural populations, funding for rural hospitals is dependent on meeting performance and quality benchmarks. Hospitals can better monitor and enhance patient outcomes by utilizing affordable mobile technologies and subscriptions to analytics-as-a-service.
A dependable healthcare IT partner can support institutions in expanding digital strategies to continuously engage with customers, develop a brand, and maintain compliance.
While the pandemic encouraged legislation that has helped rural hospitals bridge the patient-provider divide, such as increased flexibility related to telehealth, ongoing issues related to connectivity and recruitment put these technological innovations out of reach for many providers.
Rural hospitals should consider features and functionality specifically configured for smaller hospitals when evaluating HIT solutions. By selecting market-appropriate solutions, these providers can improve ROI and lessen the chance of cost overruns and other interruptions, which can occur when overly complicated systems are put into place without sufficient support.
Another option to lower the cost of ownership for health IT is through hosted solutions. Hospitals can host clinical and financial data through a technology partner, saving upfront hardware costs and decreasing the need for internal IT maintenance.
Interoperability, or the secure and easy exchange of electronic health information (EHI), is essential to providing value-based care, and remaining compliant, in the digital age.
While costs, staffing constraints, and on-site space restrictions may complicate deploying and maintaining EHR technology, hospitals that fail to achieve sufficient interoperability will be unable to comply with Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) price transparency rules.
Read more about the financial benefits of achieving interoperability and the opportunity price transparency represents for rural hospitals in our recent blog.
Despite a rapidly changing healthcare landscape, rural hospitals stay rooted in their communities by adopting market-driven technological solutions.
As a proud partner of our nation’s rural health providers, MEDHOST can provide the right products, at the right price, to help these facilities provide quality patient care and maintain a healthy business.
To learn more, contact us at inquiries@medhost.com or dial 1.800.383.6278.
The Texas based health system has extended its partnership to include its new behavioral health facility
FRANKLIN, Tenn., August 25, 2020 – A Texas-based health system, Carrus Health, and MEDHOST, a leading EHR (electronic health record) and healthcare IT solutions provider, recently completed the implementation of MEDHOST solutions at Carrus Health’s new behavioral hospital. The MEDHOST solutions are intended to boost the hospital’s clinical and financial performance and provide stability to the facility’s IT environment. Carrus Health System will utilize MEDHOST’s cloud-platform Enterprise EHR and Revenue Cycle Solutions at Carrus Behavioral Hospital, the latest addition to its group of hospitals.
MEDHOST partnered with Carrus Rehabilitation Hospital and Carrus Specialty Hospital (LTAC) prior to this recent implementation. Carrus attributes their ongoing partnership with MEDHSOST to its quality solutions, dedication to customer excellence, and exceptional service.
“I am very blessed with the opportunity to lead an amazing team which serves three hospitals located on our beautiful Sherman, Texas campus,” said Brad Sidlo, Hospital Administrator at Carrus Health. "All three of our Sherman hospitals utilize MEDHOST solutions and services. Having confidence in all aspects of your EHR solution is invaluable for us and critical to our ongoing success. From billing, to clinical care to reporting, MEDHOST helped guide us in a very organized manner from project kick off to completion. Beyond offering an optimal solution, it is evident MEDHOST wanted to exceed our expectations which we really respect and appreciate.”
“Despite a multitude of unforeseeable challenges during implementation, including construction delays and the COVID-19 pandemic, our collective teams at MEDHOST and Carrus Health were resilient, highly collaborative, and effectively communicative in a timely manner,” Brad Sidlo added. “We all had to be very flexible, but I think that says a lot about both of our organizations’ sincere mission to put patients first.”
“At MEDHOST, it is all about how we support hospitals with the solutions and services that enable them to fully focus on what they do best — provide excellent patient care even during these unprecedented times” said Bill Anderson, Chairman and CEO at MEDHOST. “Working with dedicated and focused health systems like Carrus Health is a privilege, and we look forward to our expanded partnership with Carrus Health as we continue to support their commitment to excellence.”
About MEDHOST
MEDHOST has been providing products and services to healthcare facilities of all types and sizes for over 35 years. Today, more than 1,000 healthcare facilities are partnering with MEDHOST and enhancing their patient care and operational excellence with its clinical and financial solutions, which include an integrated EHR solution. MEDHOST also offers a comprehensive emergency department information system with business and reporting tools. Additionally, its unparalleled support and cloud platform solutions make it easy to focus on what’s important for healthcare facilities: their patients and business. Connect with MEDHOST on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Contact:
Samra Khan
Sr. Enterprise Brand Manager
615-761-1000, ext. 2119
Samra.khan@medhost.com
When it’s time for healthcare providers to upgrade their health information technology (HIT) systems? Where do they start?
Before any serious HIT decisions are made, it is recommended first to evaluate how to best invest in a system environment and infrastructure.
The past decade of HIT regulations – most recently the 21st Century Cures Act – have made it clear that these solutions should be developed and implemented in ways that improve patient care, safety, and security. Hospital IT leadership is constantly being challenged to invest their dollars to meet those expectations while staying under budget. In the current market, cloud-based hosting IT services could be the answer for small and large hospitals.
Smaller hospitals that may lack the resources for in-depth HIT build-outs might find that handing the reins over to a third party can save them money over time. A cloud-based hosted HIT provider may also help larger hospitals reduce costs and free up time for internal teams.
While the immediate savings of hosting and managing a HIT infrastructure on-premise may seem attractive, future and unexpected costs can quickly add up. In addition to upfront equipment expenses, recurring maintenance and data security risks can take valuable technical and human resources away from more critical care delivery tasks.
For providers who want better to align their HIT infrastructure with today’s healthcare demands, here are seven key benefits a cloud-based HIT solution can offer:
Cost Savings
Cloud-based IT services managed by a third party can improve a healthcare organization’s return on investment (ROI) by relieving some pressures on internal IT personnel. With a reliable external team managing routine tasks that help maximize daily performance, a hospital is ultimately investing in their existing team’s ability to improve the quality of patient care and efficiency.
Cloud-based hosting services can help facilities cut costs such as:
Some of the top benefits that can come with a cloud-based hosting solution are enhanced security and speedy recovery in the face of disasters – those with human or natural origins.
Partnering with a HIPAA-compliant cloud-based hosting service means that hardware and software are provided and maintained on the hospital’s behalf. A healthcare provider also gains a certain level of confidence with a cloud-based solution. Experienced system engineers who are always on-call to ensure a hospital and its patients are protected can be reassuring.
With the rise in cyberattacks aimed at healthcare and the unpredictability of nature, providers cannot afford to cut corners when it comes to protecting patients and their data.
Increased Uptime
Cloud-based solutions are often powered by a private, high-speed, secure connection. Along with 24/7 system management and monitoring, a dedicated connection can significantly increase hospital HIT system uptime.
Partnering with a medical-grade data center host can also offer increased security with features like:
Experienced Staff
A HIT hosting partnership can effectively expand a hospital’s staff without the expensive investment of hiring additional employees.
Staff dedicated to managing and maintaining hospital technologies—clinical, financial, or otherwise— often require HIT specialty certifications. Adding or training certified IT professionals can create additional costs ranging between 30 – 77k per employee per year.
A cloud-based hosting vendor can also provide dedicated teams for HIT planning, implementation, training, and support. Shifting administrative duties to an outside hosting service is another way hospitals can help IT personnel enhance care delivery systems without adding employees.
A cloud-based hosting solution can be a strong source of resilience for hospitals facing catastrophic weather events. If a natural disaster physically damages an on-premise data environment, in many cases, that system can become inaccessible for an indefinite amount of time. Remote and cloud-based hosting can add an extra layer of security, helping ensure data availability via remote disaster recovery services.
Healthcare facilities that have experienced hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, and other natural disasters have quickly recognized the real-time benefits of a cloud-hosted IT system.
Regulatory Compliance
Managing an on-premise IT infrastructure requires consistent updating to ensure systems continually meet regulatory requirements. A hosting service can help ensure HIT regulation compliance is effectively handled, alleviating the burden on hospital staff.
Support and Training
Most hospitals and healthcare facilities working with cloud-hosting service providers benefit from a help desk that offers 24-hour support for routine issues. Hosted IT infrastructure service best practices should also include dedicated customer support contacts and the assurance of enterprise networking team availability.
By using hosted IT services, hospitals don’t have to struggle with hiring additional IT support members to troubleshoot basic server issues or respond to after-hours issues.
A properly implemented cloud-based HIT solution can help with a hospital’s day-to-day technology management while elevating care delivery and regulatory compliance. Managed by dedicated HIT specialists, MEDHOST’s cloud-based solution can help provide certainty and efficiency to providers needing to adapt to change quickly.
Hospitals and their staff have enough on their plate. Effective operations and improved care delivery can be easier to achieve when the time-consuming HIT system management is one less item to consider.
For more information on how MEDHOST’s cloud-based HIT solutions can help your facility, call us at 1.800.383.6278 or email inquiries@medhost.com.
