US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are examining how federal agencies and healthcare companies are tackling algorithmic biases – after a recent study found that black patients were less likely to be referred to care programs by software than white patients, despite being sicker. On Tuesday, Wyden (D-OR) and …

Rise of the MachinesA nightmarish vision of our future dotage awaits: government-built "care robots". The potential was outlined as part of a £34m investment in research on autonomous systems, announced by the UK's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) today. With one in seven Brits now expected to be over 75 by 2040, it …

Fancy a new job and a pay packet of upwards of £131k per year? Well, if you don't mind working with the ever-beaming Matt Hancock, the health service's newly formed digital quango, NHSX, is looking for a full-time chief technology officer. The move has been welcomed by some health and technology experts, who have warned the UK …

GP online services app Evergreen Life has been the target of a cyber-attack attempting to access the British firm's corporate email accounts. A malicious phishing email was sent to all the addresses in Evergreen clinical director Dr Brian Fisher's inbox – a rather unfortunate name given the circumstances – in what the company …

Despite years of corporate awareness training, warning articles in The Reg and regular bollockings by frustrated IT admins, human error is still behind most personal data leaks, a newly released study says. Security shop Egress studied 4,856 personal data breach reports collected from the UK Information Commissioner's Office, …

Artificially intelligent software could help doctors treat a problem that is, quite literally, a pain in the arse: prostate cancer. A team of radiologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, built a convolutional neural network to analyse MRI scans of male nether regions and detect signs of the cancer. These types …

The NHS has named the overlord of its digital health quango and talked up plans to put data specialists on cancer and mental health policy teams as tech support. The body, NHSX, was announced in February in a bid to create a centralised health tech force to unite disparate digital roles in NHS England and make decisions on …

Machine-learning algorithms can help doctors diagnose children affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, according to fresh research. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) describes a range of conditions that are caused when a woman consumes excessive amounts of booze during her pregnancy. Such benders can impact the …

Miscreants gained access to US healthcare billing vendor AccuDoc Solutions' database for about a week in September, exposing the data of at least 2.65 million people. North Carolina-based Atrium Health, a customer of AccuDoc Solutions, this week said it had been affected by the breach. The firm operates 44 hospitals across …

BSides ManchesterA children's nurse prescribed hospitals ways to improve their computer security at the BSides conference in Manchester, England, earlier this month. Jelena Milosevic developed an interest in cybersecurity over the past four years while working as an on-call nurse in several hospitals across the Netherlands, where she said …

NHS England must re-evaluate the way it outsources work to the private sector in the wake of "continued squabbles" with Capita over the mismanaged £700m Primary Support Care (PSC) contract. The seven-year agreement that began in September 2015, which includes an option to extend it for three years, was to provide support …

Israel Cyber WeekHealthcare regulations oblige medical equipment vendors to focus on developing the next generation of technologies rather than addressing current cybersecurity issues, according to experts presenting at the eighth Israel Cyber Week. Ophir Zilbiger, partner and head of the BDO Cybersecurity Center Israel consultancy, said …

Healthcare providers are the top users of public clouds, says analyst firm IDC. The outfit’s new “Worldwide Semiannual Industry Cloud Tracker” reports that growth in cloud spend across four industry sectors – finance, healthcare, manufacturing and the public sector – is ratting along at US$22.5bn a year with expected growth of …

The American Medical Association does not believe that using AI is essential in healthcare and will benefit all patients, according to a new report. It published its first policy recommendations on ‘augmented intelligence’ in time for its Annual Meeting in June. “As technology continues to advance and evolve, we have a unique …

Up to 270 women in the UK could have died of cancer due to a "computer algorithm failure" dating back to 2009 under the NHS' breast screening programme - British health secretary Jeremy Hunt said today. In a Parliamentary statement, Hunt said nearly half a million women between the age of 68 and 71 were not invited to their …

Researchers have come up with an optical gadget which, when attached to a smartphone, can check samples for 12 infectious diseases at once. The team, led by Lei Li, assistant professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Washington State University, devised the equipment to solve the problem of diagnosis …

If there's one thing security vendors love it's a catchilly-named piece of malware to whip up fervor over, and boy is it a good day to be Symantec. The company on Monday introduced the world to Orangeworm, a particularly nasty hacking operation that has been mainly attacking companies in the healthcare field. The operation is …

A US healthcare company seemingly exposed on the public internet contact information for roughly 10,000 medical professionals. IT pro Brian Wethern said he warned Health Stream nine days ago that one of its now-removed websites had left a database of users out in the open, allowing anyone to slurp the first and last names of …