Consensus Cloud Solutions at HIMSS22 launched Consensus Clarity, which integrates natural language processing and artificial intelligence to help healthcare organizations transform digital unstructured patient documents and clinical content to structured, consumable data.

With Consensus Clarity, healthcare providers can extract necessary information to improve decision-making processes throughout the continuum of care, the company said.

Delayed tests and treatments?

"When documents are unstructured, they appear within workflows without any insightful data, which means that healthcare staff must manually review and sort them before action can be taken," said Scott Turicchi, CEO of Consensus Cloud Solutions. "This results in delayed tests, treatments and often poorer health outcomes.

"Consensus Clarity helps solve these problems by unveiling actionable, insightful information that can enable better care coordination," he added. "The launch of this solution supports our mission to transform and enhance the secure exchange of digital information."

The responsible use of AI continues to provide important opportunities for healthcare leaders to streamline administrative processes and provide more effective patient care with enhanced experiences for both patients and providers, said Steve Griffiths, senior vice president for data and analytics at Optum Labs, the research and development arm of UnitedHealth Group.

"These leaders are not just users of AI, but they have an opportunity to be looked to as role models across industries in their commitment to using AI responsibly," he said.

Protecting valuable data backups

CloudWave, an independent cloud and managed-services software-hosting vendor in healthcare, has unveiled OpSus Vault.

Data is growing exponentially, and is more critical than ever to powering healthcare. OpSus Vault is designed to protect a healthcare organization's valuable data backups against increasingly effective ransomware and malicious insider threats by creating a secure, offline and immutable storage location, the company says.

In the case of ransomware and other threats, a hospital's existing backups are often infected along with the primary production environment. Additionally, there has been an increase in malicious actors targeting backup infrastructure to disrupt operations further.

The company says that OpSus Vault is designed to help create an immutable backup consisting of a standalone copy with distinct security protocols that is locked to prevent encryption, edits and deletes.

Separated from the data storage and IT environment

This immutable storage location is meant to keep the protected extra copy separated from the rest of the data storage and IT environment, particularly from the domain structure, for an extra layer of insurance. OpSus Vault deploys a secure, air-gapped cloud storage location that receives a save-set from an additionally scheduled backup job.

The cloud location then replicates a copy of its stored contents to a secure vault, located on a separate domain, with an immutable storage policy. While this immutability policy is in effect, editing and deleting data is not allowed, and access is prohibited.

Therefore, if a security incident renders a healthcare organization's normal save-sets unusable, CloudWave will make a recent copy of the immutable backup accessible. As a result, OpSus Vault's immutable backup can be restored much more quickly than working around corrupted primary and secondary copies, the company claims.

"Most organizations know how to architect a backup system to store multiple copies on different media with at least one remote save-set, but these backups can still be deleted if the appropriate credentials are compromised," said Matt Donahue, CTO at CloudWave. "By isolating backups on a separate domain and applying an immutability policy, OpSus Vault adds additional layers of protection against these types of threats."

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.