Today in health, it we're going to take a look at the headlines. This is something I started before I went on vacation and I'm just going to take one of these emails I received from Beckers with their top 15 stories. I'm going to go through them and tell you what I think of some of the stories. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system.

And creator of this week health set of channels, dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged. We want to thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health tau site nuance, Canon medical. And current health, check them out at this week. health.com/today.

All right. I started this before I went on break and. You know, I just took an email. I received this one happens to be Becker's health it and CIO report. And so these stories are supposedly relevant for CIO is there's 14 stories. I'm going to go through them pretty rapidly. And just, , give you a little bit of feedback on each one or maybe some of them. I might just judge by the headline. We'll see top tech salaries by skill. Companies are apt to pay hefty salaries for rare in demand tech skills. This is not.

New, particularly ones related to enterprise level infrastructure. Interesting such as data storage and discovery and cloud. According to the report by career website, dice.com. So here are the highest average tech salaries by skill. , let's see. Oh yeah. They're just highly, highly, , Mockito service oriented architecture.

A rabbit MQ last, a search, a Reddis. , platform is service RDS, dynamo, DB. You get the picture. , when I read this, I would say that this list is not relevant for healthcare, even though it is in the list that we get from Becker's in, they're telling us, you know, top tech salaries. It is top tech salaries. This is not top health, it tech salary, some of these might overlap, but I don't think so.

dice.com. Is really focused in on the tech industry as a whole. And not necessarily healthcare. In general. So again, I would throw that story out and say, interesting to know. I would look for any overlap that I have with the skillsets. I'm trying to find. And see if there's any relevance to it. Second story. HHS releases, new HIPAA guidance on audio tele-health visits.

For things to know. Let's see what the four things to know are the HIPAA security rule does not apply to audio. Only telehealth services provided using a standard telephone line because the information transmitted is not electronic. Interesting. The security rule applies when a covered entity uses electronic communication technologies, such as voice over IP.

Or a mobile devices that use electronic media, like the internet intra and extra nets cellular and wifi networks and covered entity. Communicating with patients via the telephone is not required to enter into a business associated agreement. With telecommunication service provider. , a business associate agreement is required. If the service provider has a hand in creating, receiving, and maintaining the information on behalf of the covered entity.

All right. So I would read those four things and say, interesting. Doesn't give me enough detail. And I didn't really learn. Too much there, I guess what. What I'm hearing is certain ways of communicating will dictate.

, whether the BAS required, , it has to be a mechanism that it digitizes the information. And is not analog. And. That's a, that's really what I learned. Kaiser Permanente notifies nearly 70,000 patients of email data breach.

Title probably tells me everything I want to know, but, , they notified 70,000 patients to the date of breach. According to the Kaiser foundation health plan of Washington, the unauthorized access occurred April 5th and was terminated hours after it began so hours after it began. That's where we want to get to with these breaches.

It's also the health plan in Washington. The emails contained, , protected health information, including first and last names, lab test results. But the health plan said it had no indication that the data. Was accessed or misused. Kaiser said the staffers email password was changed and the employee was given additional training on safe email practices. So.

They notified everyone and, , found it within just a couple of hours. So we've got to feel. , we are making progress in this area. Yesterday, I talked about Oracle. One of the stories is Oracle reports. 5% revenue hike. I as changes to new, new, newly purchased. Cerner. All right. So their revenue for last quarter increased by 5%. Great.

And now we're focused on Cerner Orco reported 5% increase in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year. Ending 11.8 billion on June 14th, the company discussed financial results and its recent purchase of Cerner, which closed in early June. Since the acquisition Oracle has added about 15.8 billion in debt. The company

, is coming through Cerner's product portfolio to see where the company can replace third-party products with Oracle technology. So they're going to reduce the overall costs. They're going to do things a little different. They're going to monetize the data. They're probably, if I were a Cerner client, I would expect cost increases from Oracle. That's traditionally what they've done.

To, , drive additional costs. They know they've got you. It's not like you're going to replace the EHR. Without a significant cost. And they'll increase the cost of the overall product. That's just one of the strategies that they utilize. So, , the revenue's good there. The purchase of Cerner and what's going to be coming from that. So that's what I read from it.

The other thing they talked about is many, , health systems already use Oracle enterprise resource planning cloud, including Kaiser, Mayo. Cleveland clinic, Mount Sinai, Northwell tenant healthcare. , the ERP platform within Oracle was one of the.

, platforms that you would get, if you were looking to work with Oracle.

But again, , Now we have more, many more health systems that are working with Oracle. , Chi health associated locations affected by vendor data breach and other data breach. , Nebraska based Chi health notified patients, the data breach that occurred as clinical guidance vendor, which has potentially exposed the protected health information of patients. So this is out of business associate, according to the Chi health website, mcg health, which provides patient.

Care guidelines to the health systems learned on March 25th at an unauthorized party had access personal information stored. On a system on April 22nd. , they notified Chi health that some of the information obtained from their breach. Contain their patient's protected health information, such as names, social security numbers, medical codes, postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, date of birth and gender.

Chi health did not say how many patients were affected and is currently mailing letters to all patients. This was a little more. , significant. I can't really tell the amount of time they were in there. That's not really revealed. But the information is serious information names, social security numbers, medical codes.

That's serious information. So that's a, that's a significant breach. I don't know if the numbers. The quantity of people is as significant, but the, , The quality of the breach is definitely a pretty significant. All right. Next story. VA watchdog finds former Cisco reprimanded it leader for expressing contract concerns. An agency watchdog found that the department of veteran affairs, VA former chief information security officer retaliated against an it leader for expressing concerns about a technology contract.

According to February report from the VA's office of accountability and whistleblower protection disciplinary action was taken against the it leader. After he raised concerns about contract negotiations between the VA's former Cisco Paul Cunningham and software company, Splunk, the watchdog found that the person was given a low performance rating and was removed from his position.

As executive director for information security, operations of the department's office of information and technology after he raised concerns. Allegedly that Mr. Cunningham had received pennies on the dollar for what the Splunk contract was worth. According to the report, U S code prohibits personal action against federal employees who discuss information in order to stop gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority, so forth and so on.

, governance matters. Know your governance process, follow your governance process. That's what I take away from that apple, Google. Apple and Google hire the most MBA grads from these schools and they are the Kellogg school of management at Northwestern university. The Wharton school and of the university of Pennsylvania.

And Columbia business school. , all well and good. My takeaway from this is a good CEO's with a good plan for hiring and bringing in the best talent. All have good relationships with the various institutions in their markets, the, , colleges and universities, they strive to develop good relationships with them. They work with departments.

They let them know what they're looking to hire. , they create internships and those kinds of programs. So always be looking at that. , let's see. Pennsylvania health system merger would create regional giant. That's really what I would look at is who are we talking about here? The proposed merger between Butler health system in Greensburg, PA based Excela health presents both health systems with opportunities for revenue, Ruth.

The Pittsburgh post Gazette reported June 13th. All right. So this is in the Pittsburgh market. The deal announced June 1st would create a five hospital system with more than a billion in revenue. That combined system would be the third largest in Western Pennsylvania, based on revenue behind the UPMC.

And Allegheny health network, according to the report. All right. So new entity. A billion dollars, that's, that's a sizeable. And, but they're going to compete with UPMC and Allegheny health who are the two big ones in that market. So I would just pocket that information away. And just know that it's there. Story number 13, tech cleared for Parkinson's monitoring via apple watch FDA has cleared a technology that allows Parkinson's patients to be remotely monitored via their apple watches. The government agency gave five.

10 K clearance for the strive PD software for, , neurology data startup rune labs, the suffer collects symptoms data through the apple watch for care management. And they designed clinical trials for Parkinson's disease. Interesting. I'd keep that in mind. I would forward this kind of story to the correct people within the health system who are working with Parkinson's patients. And then the final story, 14, Amazon dominates cloud computing, but Microsoft catching up. And Amazon continues to be in command. , of the cloud computing market, but Microsoft is gaining ground on a June 2nd report by it consultant Gardner found.

Amazon control 38.9% of the global infrastructure as a service public. Cloud market in 2021 down from 41%. In 2020, that's a significant drop by the way. Garner data shows. Meanwhile, Microsoft share rows from 19.7 to 21.1. Overall the market grew by 41.4% in 2021 to. $91 billion. All right. So this isn't necessarily healthcare. Although I will say healthcare is contributing to this trend.

Microsoft cloud. In healthcare. Is probably growing faster than the Amazon cloud in healthcare is my gut on this just based on conversations, based on the EAs. Of doing contracts based on reports of people utilizing. Azure for epic implementations amongst other things. And the more systems you see move to, , epic on Azure and those kinds of things. It's going to make the data services that reside in the Microsoft cloud that much more accessible. You wouldn't go to epic and Azure. And then all of a sudden.

I do all your, your data stuff over on Google and Amazon. , likely you wouldn't do that. You could do that. You could do that as a diversification strategy. You could do that. If you're looking for a specific tool that Google has, or Amazon has that Microsoft doesn't, but for the most part, , possession is nine-tenths of the loss of majority of your information. And your compute is in the Microsoft cloud. You're going to continue to grow that. I think this trend is going to continue.

I think Amazon's market share is going to come down. Microsoft's going to go up at least in the healthcare space. I'd love to see this report broken out by healthcare. And that's it. 14 stories in a couple minutes. Hopefully that'll keep you informed on what's going on. Again, all those things are from

, Becker's hospital review and you can check those out online. That's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can scribe on our website this week, health.com or wherever you listen to podcasts, apple, Google, overcast, Spotify, Stitcher.

You get the picture. We are everywhere. We want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health tau site nuance, Canon medical, and 📍 current health. Check them out at this week. health.com/today. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.