Nextech is committed to protecting our customers both within our health care technology systems and through our communication channels. We recommend that our customers and all health care providers keep all systems updated with the latest security patches and perform annual security assessments. The Department of Health and Human Services offers an easy-to-use assessment tool to evaluate the security of your systems, data, policies and procedures.

Your electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management (PM) systems capture a lot of information with every patient encounter. Having technology capable of creating reports and presenting them in a useful way allows you to quickly make key business decisions to improve or maintain peak practice performance in areas from clinical efficiency to financial measures. However, practices that do not take advantage of such solutions may miss out on opportunities or be delayed in making important decisions.

Not even the NFL is safe from the recent rise in stolen healthcare data. According to a report from Deadspin, a laptop belonging to an athletic trainer for the Washington Redskins was stolen out of the trainer's car after it was broken into. The laptop was located in a backpack, which was taken during the robbery.

Visit any healtchare IT blog today and it's likely you'll see a barrage of articles pertaining to cybersecurity - and for good reason. The healthcare industry has been especially vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks through tactics such as ransomware or data hacking, which is why the College of Healthcare Information Executives (CHIME) decided to do something about. In a press release on Tuesday,CHIME announced the creation of the Cybersecurity Center and Program Office.

Every day, it seems something new is happening in the healthcare industry. Whether it's greater innovations in technology, breaking compliance news or even the growing threat of data hacking, there's a lot going on in healthcare. So you're able to catch up on all of the relevant news, lunchtime links will be a valuable resource for you to read about what's going on in the industry in one place, rather than searching all over the Internet.

"This matters. It's a matter of life and death." Those were the words of Vice President Joe Biden on Monday when he spoke at the Health Datapalooza in Washington, DC. The importance of healthcare IT and data sharing isn't lost on Biden. He experienced it firsthand as his son, Beau, was fighting cancer over a year ago. The Vice President described how difficult it was for the different hospitals his son received care at to share information.

Data breaches are becoming an all too common occurrence in today's society. That could be quite an understatement for the healthcare industry, according to one report. An Internet Security Threat Report conducted by Symantec found that 39 percent of all data breaches in 2015 were within the healthcare industry.

Ransomware is becoming more common and the healthcare industry has recently been a favorite target of hackers. With five ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations in the last month, healthcare organizations need to pay more attention to combatting ransomware.