Everything is going digital, and that includes the way clinicians prescribe medications. Up until recently, so-called “e-prescribing” has been largely limited to non-controlled substances, but times are changing. Hopeful regulators see the key to reducing prescription-drug addiction at the heart of e-prescribing authentication measures, even moving to encourage vendors and providers to get on board with a 2010 revision of DEA rules that allows for controlled substances to be prescribed electronically.

A crisis often brings out the best of the best. We’re seeing that now in the healthcare community, where many of our colleagues are truly rising to the occasion. We are all pulling together and doing everything we can to address the surge of COVID-19 patients. In disaster scenarios like a pandemic, by definition, demands outweigh resources. So, what do we do?

There is perhaps no topic in healthcare that’s bigger and more relevant than digital transformation. There’s also no topic that can be interpreted in as many ways.

“Digital transformation can mean a lot of things to different people,” said Sean Kelly, CMO and SVP of Customer Strategy, Imprivata), who moderated a panel on the subject at ViVE23. Kelly, who is also a practicing emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, likened driving digital transformation to “reengineering a plane while still flying it.”

With the exception of the Covid pandemic, few crises have perplexed the medical community as much as the opioid epidemic. Thanks to the efforts of groups like the CHIME Opioid Task Force, there’s been a reduction in the number of opioid prescriptions and an increased awareness for treating overdoses.

And yet, the death toll continues to rise. According to the CDC, 11,355 overdose deaths were reported during the 12-month period ending April 2023, compared with 110,394 deaths in the 12-month period ending March 2022.

As organizations across all sectors face an increasing volume of cyber-attacks, CISOs must continue to perform a careful balancing act – protecting their organization’s systems while implementing security measures that don’t overly inconvenience or disrupt employees. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of user authentication and password management. If authentication requirements are too simple, cyber-criminals can easily overcome them. However, too complex, and employees will simply ignore or try to bypass them. After all, it’s human nature to prioritize convenience over security.