In recent years, the healthcare industry has undergone rapid and radical changes that have shifted the way hospitals, medical professionals, and patients interact. Looking forward to 2023, it’s now time to focus on forecasting where healthcare may be headed this coming year and beyond. There are several predictions that healthcare professionals should be aware of as you plan for the new year to make well informed decisions when navigating upcoming changes in healthcare.

It's the most wonderful time of the year, but for healthcare professionals, it can also be one of the busiest. As you celebrate with your family and friends, don't forget about HIPAA policies and other privacy regulations that must be followed even during the holiday season. Here are some tips to help make sure you stay on track and maintain compliance policies while still enjoying all the festivities.

Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, puts an incredible amount of stress on healthcare organizations. It’s a balancing act to provide the best patient care while systems are being restored, all while keeping patient information secure. Unfortunately, with the increase of ransomware in the healthcare industry, unplanned downtime is becoming a more common threat and adds even more complexity to the mix.

Both new and well-known regulations alike were updated during the COVID-19 pandemic to better support healthcare providers. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has seen some modest relaxing of some of its components but remains largely unchanged.

If your privacy team is like most hospitals, managing influxes of privacy tasks, as a result of new privacy concerns can be difficult. While the answer of bringing in 3rd party help might seem expensive or difficult to manage, in reality, supplementing your privacy team as needed by using Patient Privacy Managed Services can help your healthcare organizations quickly scale up to accommodate new requests and scale down when resources are no longer needed.

Unauthorized access to patients’ protected health information (PHI) is illegal — so why do healthcare professionals keep doing it? How do you get them to stop?A recent JAMA Network study on PHI breaches provides insights into employee behavior regarding privacy data, and how that behavior can be corrected.

Our patient privacy experts hit the road for the first time since early 2020 this month, and it was great to be back! iatricSystems attended ViVE and HIMSS over the past two weeks, and it was wonderful catching up with old friends, seeing new faces, and talking patient privacy with some of the brightest minds in the industry. For those that were able to attend the conference with us, welcome back, and if you couldn’t attend, let’s catch you up on what you might have missed.

Looking back on 2021, healthcare organizations have been pushed to their technological limit. Increased patient demand and staffing shortages have forced nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and lab technicians to look to the digital space to increase efficiency, provide adequate care, and protect PHI data. As healthcare organizations adopt a more digital approach, what does this mean for the future of healthcare? Let’s look at the top trends that I predict are here to stay.

Looking back to 2021, the healthcare industry was challenged to adapt to patient surges, remote workers, staffing shortages, and more. Throughout the past year, hospital organizations and HIPAA pivoted to be nimbler with actions such as relaxing compliance guidelines on telemedicine to improve patient care but may also have created new security gaps.