Over a decade after ‘Meaningful Use’ – a program that was supposed to improve quality at the point of patient care – clinicians are still struggling to do their jobs. But is technology becoming the problem? Although the transition to electronic health records (EHR) was meant to make healthcare faster and safer, accessing it (efficiently) has proven to be a major obstacle.

Digital care transformation, the proliferation of disruptive technologies and the changing hybrid workforce have forced the evolution of traditional information technology network boundaries of healthcare organizations. The new landscape has rendered legacy existing perimeter defined and based cybersecurity solutions inadequate to meet increasing regulatory and federal demands for highly secure access management.

Everyone talks about how healthcare is overwhelmed. That’s an understatement. Frankly, healthcare has been under tremendous stress since well before the pandemic. While IT isn’t the only factor inflating pressure, it’s a major contributor. Applications are decentralized and outdated, the fragmented IT environment has proven unsustainable, and change is necessary for digital transformation. But what exactly does that look like?

Put yourself in my shoes… a Code Stroke patient arrives in our busy ER. Time is of the essence. We need to rapidly diagnose and treat the patient to prevent long term paralysis or even death. But nothing happens until we can access their health records, review the relevant data, order a CT scan, consult our colleagues, and initiate treatment. And none of that can happen at all because our hospital has put in a new enhanced password policy. As well they should. Keeping protected health information (PHI) private and secure is of utmost concern in healthcare…but more on that later.

COVID-19 forced a spike in policy-makers’ interest and willingness to invest in public health; a spike that is unfortunately retreating to the old business as usual. (President Biden, in his State of the Union speech, warned “we remain vigilant” while calling for an end to the emergency, but quickly switched the subject from the urgency of public health to prosecuting fraud.) Luckily, along with increased attention came a raft of intelligent suggestions for changing how public health institutions carry out their mission, starting with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).