Before venturing out to attend the 2016 Nextech EDGE conference last week, I decided to write a bit of a teaser blog article on a topic I was covering at my session on cybersecurity—Social Engineering. (Side note: I would like to extend a most sincere thank you to everyone at EDGE who attended my sessions). In order to avoid publishing any spoilers, however, I chose not to go into too much detail and promised to elaborate further once I returned from the conference. Well… I have returned, so it is time for me to make good on that promise. Since we already explained what social engineering is in the previous article, I don’t think it’s necessary to rehash all the basics. Instead, let’s start by taking a look at some examples of social engineering tactics that are commonly employed by hackers and cybercriminals.

When we set out to create EDGE - Nextech's National User Conference - we envisioned an environment where clients could unite as one Nextech community, educating, discovering, generating and exchanging with industry colleagues. EDGE 2016 accomplished just that - in record numbers, too.

On this blog, we’ve had a lot of discussion about the problem of human behavior when it comes to cybersecurity. For example, we have looked at the Sony Pictures breach, which was caused by spear-phishing emails. We looked at Edward Snowden’s hack of the NSA, which he accomplished by simply calling agents and requesting their login credentials (a combination of “pretexting” and phone phishing). We even examined the notorious agent.btz worm that spread through the entire DoD network when an agent used a USB drive he found in a parking lot. While all of the abovementioned data breaches were accomplished by different means, they all have one thing in common—all three of them employed some form of human-based tactic. The biggest reason that humans have potential to be a data security factor can be summed up in two words… Social Engineering.

Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it will be implementing a two-week extension period for practices attesting to Meaningful Use. The deadline originally fell on Leap Day - February 29 - but the extension period will push back the final day to March 11. The extension applies to all eligible professionals, eligible hospitals and critical aspect hospitals participating in Meaningful Use program.

If you’ve been paying attention to current events these days, you’re likely already aware of the Zika virus outbreak that’s hitting the Americas. Cases of Zika are now beginning to pop up in North America, which has prompted the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to order their Emergency Operations Center to assume a Level 1 activation status (its highest level), in preparation for a possible nationwide outbreak in the United States. A Level 1 activation places CDC personnel into overdrive, allowing for 24/7 response capabilities. Just to give you an idea of how serious this is, the CDC has only ordered Level 1 activations three times in their 70-year history—after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, during the H1N1 outbreak of 2009, and during the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Of course, the World Health Organization (WHO) already declared the Zika virus a “global health emergency” back on Feb. 1, 2016.

In our last blog article, we took a look at how human behavior is the most frequently encountered threat to data security. So, what to do? You can’t have 100 percent control over every problematic aspect of human behavior, after all. However, there are some ways for you to simply remove the human element from your data security equation, such as purchasing a private, HIPAA compliant Cloud or adopting a SaaS-based EMR/EHR solution.

The future appears to be bright the ambulatory EHR market.. According to Frost & Sullivan's US Ambulatory Electronic Health Record Market: 2015-2020 report, the ambulatory EHR market is expected to grow by a whopping 30 percent throughout the next five years, increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 5.3 percent. This projection comes after prior mass expansion of the market due to incentives from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Ever since the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act was introduced in 2009, the healthcare industry has placed an enormous priority on implementing more electronic software in clinics.