The topic of security is on the minds of most healthcare IT professionals today. Securing remote access to your hospital's network is the deadbolt that helps protect your data. Most people don't leave their backdoor wide open, or expect that little doorknob lock to be secure, so why do most hospitals do the equivalent with their networks?

Times, they are a changing! And, that's a good thing! Have you evaluated or made plans to move to MEDITECH's new Expanse platform? I wanted to share with you how we are keeping up with the changes and helping hospitals keep up too.

As an IT security vendor, it's hard to compete with hope. After all, hope is free.

I was chatting with a group of hospital CIOs recently and we were discussing network security and what makes their networks vulnerable. I was surprised by the difficulty each was having with remote access by physician office staff. It was unanimously one of the greatest concerns. While we know they have some longstanding, awesome partnerships with physician offices, there are three main vulnerabilities that have surfaced with remote network access:

1) Unknown terminations
2) Inappropriate access discipline
3) Access after termination

It is said that a heart attack is 80% preventable by eating well, exercising regularly, and keeping stress to a minimum*. While there is no official statistic yet, I would say that a cyber-attack is 95% preventable by vetting partners well, exercising caution, and keeping access points to a minimum. 

It's 2018, a time when there is an endless amount of information available, multiple technologies to choose from, a 24/7 news cycle, and access to any type of information, in seconds, at your fingertips. (Or, actually, without even having to use your fingertips at all — you simply have to say out loud what you want to know!)

It's always fun to take a quick look back at the prior year and see what was accomplished, but my favorite thing is looking ahead to the future, and prioritizing what we can do to help organizations meet their 2018 goals.

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"After years of frustrations, user wish-list turns positive." The headline from this year's EHR Satisfaction Survey suggests improvements in attitude and satisfaction toward hospital EHRs, yet the underlying challenges for CIOs and clinicians still haven't changed very much.