healthsystemCIO – Strategies for Hospital IT Leaders

When Covid-19 hit and priorities were constantly shifting, healthcare IT teams didn’t need a technology expert; they need an “air traffic controller” who could communicate effectively, said Chris Myers. In this interview, he talks about how he has drawn from his military experience to guide teams both during and after the pandemic. Source: Q&A with Doylestown Health CIO Chris Myers: The ‘Secret Sa...

Most CISOs understand that one of their key phone calls after a ransomware incident will be to the FBI, but what they may not appreciate is that it shouldn’t be their first to that organization. That’s because the emergency call will be much more effective, and the response much more efficient, if a relationship has […] Source: Q&A with Alan McHugh, Chief, FBI Cyber Division, Cyber Crime Tactical...

One the main keys to success in any business is focusing on certain products and services to the exclusion of others – to draw a circle in the sand and say, ‘We play in these areas, and in them we will be the best.’ If an organization can’t be great at something that others are doing better, it may be time to reallocate those resources. For Damon Auer, the time for health systems with hospitals at...

Your organization needs cyber insurance. Why? Over 80% of organizations experienced at least one successful phishing attack in 2021, and 54% experienced a cyberattack in the last 12 months. Considering the average cost of a data breach was $4.35 million in 2022 – and even higher in the healthcare industry at $10.1 million – cyber insurance is a business concern that urgently needs your attention....

Busy CISOs working in healthcare never lack actionable threat intelligence. What they need is to quickly find the signal within the noise of cybersecurity alerts – and then effectively remediate risks and vulnerabilities before they can compromise PHI and other sensitive healthcare data. The talent shortage in cybersecurity has left many in-house security teams understaffed and overwhelmed, especi...

Email is the lifeblood of any organization, with thousands coming in every day. It’s also the number one attack vector. Unfortunately, even the best filtering tools miss between 7 and 10 percent of the spam that CISOs would love to see caught. That puts the onus on employees to manually filter the rest. It’s for […] Source: Q&A with Rebecca Kennis, CISO, Arnot Health: My One Number Job is Creating...

Email is both the lifeblood of an organization's communications and -- for that very reason -- the number one vector cyber criminals are leveraging to wreak havoc. To protect email, smart organizations are using a combination of employee education, process improvement and tools (including role-based personas) to prevent people from falling for phishing attacks. But it's not as simple as locking ev...

“No one sits you down and teaches you how to look at data,” said Linda Stevenson, CIO at Fisher-Titus. In a recent interview, she spoke about the need for ongoing training, the “cybersecurity by committee” approach her team is taking, the challenges facing rural healthcare leaders, and how her yoga training has paid off. Source: Q&A with Fisher-Titus CIO Linda Stevenson: “Every Conversation, Every...

Most IT executives know that, despite taking all prudent measures, breaches are going to happen. And these days those breaches are sometimes followed by lawsuits (recently reaching class-action status). Even short of lawsuits, OCR or another entity could always come calling for one reason or another, demanding an intense look around. So what's a CIO or CISO to do? Skate to the puck, that's what. I...

Though the exact order may differ, almost every CIO & CISO will say that medical device security is one of their top three concerns. And those who have made little headway with this challenge will confess that a tool alone -- absent sound governance & sensible policies -- won't solve the problem. That's because reducing medical device security risks to a point that everyone can sleep at night is d...

Randall “Fritz” Frietzsche has been on a mission to protect and serve for a long time. Way back when, it was in traditional law enforcement as a deputy sheriff. Later, as he embraced his technical acumen, it was in cybersecurity. But Frietzsche, Enterprise CISO for Denver Health, attests that all the technical chops in the […] Source: Q&A with Denver Health Enterprise CISO Randall “Fritz” Frietzsc...

All of the excellent clinical care in the world can be quickly forgotten if patients are then subjected to a barrage of excessive, fragmented and/or poorly sequenced communication from your health system. And it's happening around the industry. In a move from famine to feast, many organizations have gone from no digital patient engagement tools to too many, with departments and service lines bomba...

The key aspect in being able to lead teams through a major change – or two, in this case – is transparency, according to Jeff Buda, CIO at Atrium Health Floyd. In this interview, he talks about his open-door policy, the benefits of becoming part of a large organization, and why he’s a big proponent of remote work. Source: Q&A with Atrium Health Floyd CIO Jeff Buda: Open Doors, Learning Curves and...

One of the most serious compliance issues CIOs and CISOs deal with are insider privacy breaches. And, not surprisingly, all such breaches are not alike. At a high level, they break down into malicious versus non-malicious, giving IT executives two paths to go down as they address the infraction. Beyond that, the issues can be dealt with in any number of ways, but all of those will see the IT execu...

Faced with shrinking margins in the face of competitive headwinds, health systems must start being more consumer friendly. And one of the main ways to do that, says Verato CEO Clay Ritchey, is leveraging data to better customize outreach, resulting in better service. But that can only be accomplished if health systems are able to form a complete picture of the patient across their internal departm...

The more you know about your customer, the better you can serve them. And that definitely goes for health system CISOs trying to serve (and protect) their clinician customers. As Dr. Eric Liederman says, it’s not that hard to lock things down; what’s trickier is putting in place as much protection and risk mitigation as […] Source: Q&A with Eric Liederman, MD, National Leader, Privacy, Security &...

It may be a cliché, but for security leaders, knowledge is definitely power. And that knowledge must come from a number of directions. First off, CISOs and their teams must be ingesting the latest threat intelligence to know what the bad guys are up to, but that information can only be acted upon in a […] Source: Q&A with WellSpan Health Director of Information Security Mike Shrader: “Empathy & Co...

Though sharing information with other health systems may not be a priority for leadership teams working through a breach, it is, ironically, one of the most important actions organizations can take for their peers, according to Denise Anderson, President of Health ISAC. That’s because, as she puts it, “one person’s defense will become everyone else’s […] Source: Q&A with Health-ISAC President Deni...

Many CIOs today think that unless their name is synonymous with innovation, their resume won't get a second look. Thus, they push initiatives that may not line up with the limited resources at their disposal or what their organizations really need. In this webinar about the value that can be found in focusing on blocking and tackling, long-time CIO Chuck Podesta will present Renown Health's 2-year...

“Nurses and doctors didn’t go to school to become data entry technicians; and yet, a lot times, that’s what we feel like we’re doing,” said Gregg Nicandri, MD. In this interview, he talks about how URMC is leveraging technology to offload some of the burden, and shares his thoughts on the evolving CMIO role and what it takes to successfully drive change. Source: Q&A with URMC CMIO Gregg Nicandri:...

The key to being a successful cybersecurity leader is to understand the business and mission, said Jeffrey Vinson, Chief Cyber & Information Security Officer at Harris Health System. “You have to understand what the core outcomes are supposed to be, and make sure you’re moving toward them.” Source: Q&A with Harris Health Chief Cyber & Info Security Officer Jeffrey Vinson: “The only safe day was ye...

For better or worse, finding success with AI takes more than plugging those projects into existing governance structures. At first, this may not seem the case, as implementation of AI-light projects -- such as RPA, native EHR predictive modeling, or chatbot-powered symptom checkers -- give the impression that today's governance will do the trick. But true AI requires a different approach, one that...

Today’s health systems are challenged with doing more with less. Clinician burnout, labor shortages and ongoing inflationary trends are creating urgency for greater insight into what's really going on around resource utilization. To gain such insight and impact challenges such as length of stay and early readmissions, data from many systems beyond the EMR must be brought together to provide visibi...

What it means to be a good CISO changes over time. In the past, it was all about rolling out some technologies that protected the enterprise. Today, however, that’s just stakes to play. Today, CISO are being defined by how good they are at keeping the business up and running, and how quickly they get […] Source: Q&A with University of Miami Health System AVP/CISO Mauricio Angee: Time to Remediate...

In this interview, BJ Moore, CIO and EVP of Real Estate Strategy Operations at Providence, talks about the concerns he has with large-language models (and the hype surrounding it), his team’s 4-year journey to a single instance of Epic, and the assumptions that outsiders often make about healthcare. Source: Q&A with Providence CIO BJ Moore: “Don’t Try to Catch Up on 20 Years.” on healthsystemcio.c...