Hack targets Singapore president’s health records

With help from Mohana Ravindranath and Darius Tahir

THAT’S PERSONAL: Hackers stole the personal health records of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and 1.5 million other Singaporean in an unprecedented data breach that analysts believe came from a state actor like Russia, China or North Korea. Singapore government officials called the attack against the country’s largest network of hospitals and clinics “a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyberattack and not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs.” The city-state announced Friday that the hackers had targeted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong specifically. The attack started two weeks after Singapore hosted the summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Tweet of the Day: Bob Wachter @Bob_Wachter A perfect Sunday: a man and his dog watching #TigerWoods in the hunt at a great #BritishOpen at #Carnoustie (pic by @katiehafner)

Welcome to Monday Morning eHealth, where we, for one, are enjoying the prospect of several days of D.C. gloom punctuated by rain and spurts of sunshine, with temperatures staying below 85. Send tips to [email protected], or broadcast news @arthurallen202, @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro, @Morning_eHealth.

DRUG PRICE BLUEPRINT ISN’T VISIBLE TO MOST: President Donald Trump was hoping for a big win with voters when he rolled out a massive blueprint to lower drug prices in May, report POLITICO’s Sarah Karlin-Smith and Brianna Ehley. But two months later, only about one in four adult Americans have even heard about it, a new POLITICO-Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll found. Of that group, just 37 percent believe it will lower prices Medicare pays for prescription drugs while 42 percent think it will accomplish the task for the country overall. On another high profile health challenge, Americans think the Trump administration needs to spend more money to help people with opioid addiction. Pros can read the whole story here.

ONE THERANOS SUIT DOWN, ONE GAZILLION TO GO: Investors suing Theranos, its founder, Elizabeth Holmes and former president, Ramesh Balwani, settled a shareholder lawsuit aimed at recovering what’s salvageable from the fallen blood testing startup. No dollar figure was released for the settlement. More from Bloomberg here.

GENOMICS GENIUS SUED: Human Longevity Inc., one of the futuristic health companies created spun off by J. Craig Venter, has filed suit against Venter’s non-profit foundation, claiming that after Venter was fired from Human Longevity he stole trade secrets and made them available to competitors. Human Longevity is using genomics and other data to search for ways to treat a variety of diseases and disorders and help people to live longer. Venter, who famously raced the government to sequence the first human genome (it was sort of a tie), created a non-profit institute in 2006 and then co-founded Human Longevity in 2013. More details here.

PRIORITIES TAKE TIME: ONC’s new Interoperability Standards Priorities Task Force will meet twice monthly for the next year to identify data-sharing standards for segments of health care, and how government and industry can further develop them. The task force will wrap up by reporting to the full Health IT Advisory Committee in September 2019. After a meeting Friday, the 21 members of the task force were instructed to study the ONC’s Interoperability Standards Advisory, a list of the standards and implementation specifications that can best be used to address specific interoperability needs.

The committee, co-chaired by Ken Kawamoto of the University of Utah and Steven Lane of California’s Sutter Health, has yet to fully define the specifics of its mission. For example, a slide presentation to members of the task force included several priority uses, such as obtaining a pediatric patient’s immunization history. But the list can be edited. “Think about it,” Lane advised the group, “Put it under the pillow at night.”

INTERMOUNTAIN ADVANCES SOCIAL DETERMINANTS PROJECT: The Utah health care giant’s $12 million social determinants of health analysis could uncover new findings about technology’s role in health, Intermountain’s Mikelle Moore tells Morning eHealth.

As we reported earlier this month, Intermountain’s Utah Alliance for the Determinants of Health will operate two demonstration programs in that state looking into the effect that factors such as housing instability and interpersonal violence have on health. The alliance will focus its analysis on members of Intermountain’s health insurance plan and is also designing an ethnographic study interviewing and observing Medicaid members, Moore says.

INTEL EXEC SAYS LIGHT REGULATION BEST FOR AI: Intel’s AI lead Naveen Rao says government can best encourage the development of the technology by opening up more datasets for algorithms to crunch and by funding primary research. In an interview with Morning eHealth’s Mohana Ravindranath, he also advocated for a light regulatory approach. “The worst case would be to say, ‘you need to use this much AI in this sort of application,” Rao says.

Intel’s AI division partners with companies in specific industries instead of entering those markets directly; it provides the underlying AI for some of GE Healthcare’s imaging services, for instance. Within health, a major challenge is “finding the proper incentive structure to get these technologies to be taken up” and “who’s going to pay for these things to get rolled out,” Rao said.

WHAT WE’RE CLICKING:

—Houston Chronicle: Telemedicine keeps a lonely medical practice going

—The Guardian: National Health Service to get 487 million pound IT boost

—Tucson.com: Investigation finds scary moments during Epic-to-Cerner conversion at Banner facility

—The Hill: Treatment advocates say 42 CFR Part 2 bill would harm people with addiction

—Healthcareblog: A patient advocate attacks hospital association’s rationale for data sharing go-slow

—Mobihealthnews: Advances in digital dermatology