Healthcare cybersecurity will be one of the top 10 challenges, issues, and/or opportunities facing healthcare executives next year, according to a new poll by the Healthcare Executive Group (HCEG).

Healthcare cybersecurity covers such issues as protecting the privacy and security of healthcare consumer information to maintain consumer trust in sharing data, the HCEG explained.

For the poll, the HCEG board and other thought leaders presented a list of more than 25 topics to participants in HCEG’s annual forum.

Other top challenges, issues, and/or opportunities for 2019 included data and analytics, total consumer health, population health services, value-based payments, the digital healthcare organization, rising pharmacy costs, external market disruption, operation effectiveness, and opioid management.

This is the fourth straight year that healthcare cybersecurity made it into the top 10 challenges, issues, and/or opportunities based on the annual HCEG poll.

For last year’s poll, which looked at issues for this year’s healthcare executives, cybersecurity ranked sixth. In the 2016 poll, which looked at 2017 issues confronting healthcare execs, cybersecurity ranked fourth.

“Selecting and ranking healthcare issues is always a challenge as we are in a very critical and dynamic stage in healthcare,” stated HCEG Executive Director Ferris W. Taylor.

“HCEG plans to further explore the reasoning through facilitated discussions at upcoming events and within the HCEG digital community. It’s a compliment to the HCEG members that we reached an agreement on these 10 critical and actionable issues,” Taylor added.

Image Credit:   Alias Studio Sydney

Thanks to Dr. ir Johannes Drooghaag. Follow him on twitter:@DrJDrooghaag

News This Week

Researchers Discover New Origin of Deep Brain Waves

Understanding hippocampal activity could improve sleep and cognition therapies. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine’s biomedical engineering department have discovered a new origin for two essential brain waves—slow waves and sleep spindles—that are critical for [...]