The adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has increased substantially in hospitals and clinician offices in large part due to the “meaningful use” program of the Health Information Technology for Clinical and Economic Health (HITECH) Act. The motivation for increasing EHR use in the HITECH Act was supported by evidence-based interventions for known significant problems in healthcare.
In spite of widespread adoption, EHRs have become a significant burden to physicians in terms of time and dissatisfaction with practice. This raises a question as to why EHR interventions have been difficult to generalize across the health care system, despite evidence that they contribute to addressing major challenges in health care.
The world is reeling from the massive ransomware attack on at least a hundred nations’ computer systems. The unprecedented malware spasm infected hundreds of thousands of computers, and would have infected millions more but for a 22-year old computer science student who found a vulnerability in the malware that he used to curtail the infection. He found it looked for a non-existent URL, so he a set up that URL and found he could stop it spreading. Of course, now the hackers know that, it is an easy matter to update the malware to use other URLs and other techniques. Clearly, this iconic malware attack is not going to be the last.
