Ascension cyberattack is disrupting care at hospitals

text.npr.org

5 points·hi41··4 comments

FTA: "The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Monday it is investing more than $50 million in a cybersecurity effort to create tools to help hospitals better defend themselves against these kinds of threats."

1. $50 million is a drop in the bucket

2. While Americans loathe national healthcare provisioning, isn't it past time we created national healthcare patient systems? We can nationalize the IT part, and according to all the debates we've had about national healthcare, that alone would save us billions of dollars every year. Our national healthcare infrastructure is crumbling too!

Yeah,I re-read that sentence to be sure it was only $50M which seems very low to deal with this huge problem.

I thought EPIC was already kind of the defacto national healthcare patient software system, seems like every hospital uses them.

Epic is only in around 1/3 of hospitals or a little under 1/2 of hospital beds (pick your favorite measure). Cerner and Athena are other big ones. Usually a regional provider tends to go with one so some regions may seem to be all Epic and others all Cerner but overall Epic is far from a national system rather just the one with plurality.

Coming from healthcare IT (and actually at Ascension for a stint) and working with Epic, Cerner, and Athena I'll say they aren't really strides different from each other in technology effectiveness. Ascension in particular is a mix. E.g. the Wisconsin region uses Epic but the Indiana region uses Athena with no plans for one system to take over all regions (very costly to migrate for little change in delivered value).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com