In an unprecedented incident that has left medical authorities in Western Australia (WA) in disbelief, a local teenager has been found to be the mastermind behind a massive data breach. The breach intercepted thousands of names, phone numbers and communications between doctors responding to the COVID-19 crisis from their pagers. This is an unfortunate incident and a simple reminder of how pagers jeopardize the security of sensitive patient information.

On-call scheduling enables 24/7/365 availability of service providers for critical issues like system downtime, technician response for critical systems, and patient care. Learn about the importance of on-call schedules for your organization and its customers, how to design an on-call schedule, and multiple ways you can build an on-call scheduling program that will improve customer response and make staff happier.

Clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) systems enhance care coordination to improve the patient experience. The systems are equipped with secure mobile messaging, allowing care teams to ditch their insecure pagers for HIPAA-compliant smartphone applications. Gartner, the global leader in tech research, has released its Hype Cycle for Real-Time Health System (RTHS) Technologies, 2020.

Within the cyber security industry, it is well known that as a company grows, so does its attack surface. This trend lends itself largely to the fact that as more employees are hired, more company-owned machines (laptops, tablets, etc.) are distributed. The risk is that once a company-owned machine is given to an employee, it is up to the employee whether to follow the security best practices set forth by your company. Your technological asset has now become a security risk.

Email alerting is an inefficient way to receive and address critical alerts. Email inboxes tend to get flooded with “clutter,” as irrelevant messages bury urgent incident notifications. Incident management procedures require incident management systems, ensuring that urgent issues are immediately addressed. Yet, some services are reluctant to say goodbye to email alerting and its inefficiencies. This is the case with Google Voice, which recently solidified its commitment to email alerting.

If you’ve been following the U.K. healthcare landscape, you would know that the country has been considering replacing pagers for the longest time. This may soon materialize, partly accelerated by the challenges that doctors are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pager replacement initiative not only signifies a pivotal shift from the aging infrastructure, but it also indicates how pagers have failed to thrive in today’s unprecedented times.

When making purchasing decisions, organizations must consider a vendor’s product pricing, promised benefits and level of customer service. Thorough vendor evaluation tends to result in successful investments, allowing organizations to reap the benefits of their newly acquired products without buyer’s remorse. Unfortunately, some buyers dismiss the importance of personal information security and how the vendor promises to protect user data.