HFMA NJ Chapter

Healthcare Cyber Threat!!! HHS, FBI Warn Health Care Industry About Social Engineering Campaign HealthIT Security (7/1, McKeon) reports, “HHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA) to disseminate indicators of compromise related to a social engineering campaign targeting health care and public health entities. In particular, “the CSA warned that threat actors have been using phishing schemes to steal login credentials for initial access and divert automated clearinghouse (ACH) payments to US-controlled bank accounts.” To do this, “threat actors often call an organization’s IT help desk and impersonate employees to trigger a password reset for the targeted employee’s account. The American Hospital Association (AHA) issued alerts in January and April warning health care entities of similar help desk social engineering schemes.” #cyberattack #csa #hhs

The Next Pandemic? - Bird Flu Virus! It’s been nearly three months since the U.S. government announced an outbreak of the bird flu virus on dairy farms. The World Health Organization considers the virus a public health concern because of its potential to cause a pandemic, yet the U.S. has tested only about 45 people across the country. “We’re flying blind,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. With so few tests run, she said, it’s impossible to know how many farmworkers have been infected, or how serious the disease is. A lack of testing means the country might not notice if the virus begins to spread between people — the gateway to another pandemic. “We’d like to be doing more testing. There’s no doubt about that,” said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s bird flu test is the only one the Food and Drug Administration has authorized for use right now. Shah said the agency has distributed these tests to about 100 public health labs in states. “We’ve got roughly a million available now,” he said, “and expect 1.2 million more in the next two months.” But Nuzzo and other researchers are concerned because the CDC and public health labs aren’t generally where doctors order tests from. That job tends to be done by major clinical laboratories run by companies and universities, which lack authorization for bird flu testing. As the outbreak grows — with at least 114 herds infected in 12 states as of June 18 — researchers said the CDC and FDA are not moving fast enough to remove barriers that block clinical labs from testing. In one case, the diagnostics company Neelyx Labs was on hold with a query for more than a month. #birdflu #pandemic #cdc #who

Our Summer Networking event is coming up soon! Thank you to our sponsors Vantage Financial, adonis, Annuity Health, LLC, and Medix™. Register now: https://lnkd.in/e4YSppZ4

Our Summer Networking event is coming up soon! Thank you to our sponsors Vantage Financial, adonis, Annuity Health, LLC, and Medix™. Register now: https://lnkd.in/e4YSppZ4