Month: March 2024

The phone awakened Doug Nordman at 3 a.m. A surgeon was calling from a hospital in Grand Junction, Colo., where Mr. Nordman’s father had arrived at the emergency room, incoherent and in pain, and then lost consciousness.At first, the staff had thought he was suffering a heart attack, but a CT scan found that part of his small intestine had been perforated. A surgical team repaired the hole, saving his life, but the surgeon had some questions.“Was your father an alcoholic?” he asked. The doctors had found Dean Nordman malnourished, his peritoneal cavity “awash with alcohol.”The younger Mr. Nordman, a…

The recent cyberattack on the billing and payment colossus Change Healthcare revealed just how serious the vulnerabilities are throughout the U.S. health care system, and alerted industry leaders and policymakers to the urgent need for better digital security.Hospitals, health insurers, physician clinics and others in the industry have increasingly been the targets of significant hacks, culminating in the assault on Change, a unit of the giant UnitedHealth Group, on Feb. 21.The ransomware attack on the nation’s largest clearinghouse, which handles a third of all patient records, had widespread effects. Fixes and workarounds have alleviated some distress, but providers are still…